Guild Wars 2

MarkPhilips.5169:

Random Weird Guy.3528:

So why does nobody ever use them in tournaments?

Because it’s so brainless that people probably feel ashamed to use it.

But turret engi build has an amazing low skill cap and too high rewards.

It needs balance.

No because the only one that does reasonable dps is rocket which you can focus down, thumper obviously don’t stand next to it, rifle does very little damage except for it’s OK damage when it’s overcharged.

The only thing it’s good for is 1v1ing on point, but just don’t go to that point on your own and the engi has to just stand there and be useless to his team, or pick up his turrets to move somewhere else, allowing you to take advantage of the cooldowns.

Also as a burst class, attack him off point and he either has to waste his turrets off point or reach the point with 25% hp.

You want to play with a dead woman? That’s disgusting.

Seriously I can only play PvP in 1 hour bursts now before I get too angry at the game and stop.

I’ve never in any point of my GW2 life had this issue, the game is at a massive all-time low and lots of people are going to be leaving the game – even those who don’t certainly aren’t going to be recommending the game to anyone.

And everyone knows what problems there are with the game because there have been non-stop complaints on the forums since leagues.

Can I just point out that the thread title makes no sense? Jesus took 3 days to res.

Celestial necros counter d/d eles (constant boon removal, transferring burns). Condi rangers, condi mesmers and condi engis are all capable of killing d/d eles on point, though those are hardly meta.

All guardians have to spec into virtues.
All thieves have to spec into trickery.
All elementalists have to spec into water and arcana.
All necros have to spec into soul reaping.

If fast hands if to become baseline, all of these classes would also require extra baseline traits.

So let’s look at this protection buff.

This is a buff that about 1.5 years ago was used to actively mitigate burst damage, being available on demand for a short duration. Bunker guardians are a good example of this, able to give AoE protection on demand to actively counter burst on allies through a variety of skills.

Fast-forward to now and 90%+ protection up-time across entire teams is now normal, nobody has to think about using protection on demand because they can simply spam the buff to maintain it. This basically means that all of the power damage in the game is permanently nerfed by 33% (40% with a tempest in the fight).

Protection needs to be brought back to being a buff that is used on-demand to actively counter power bursts by reducing the amount of passive access to this buff. Main offenders are the following:

Rune of Durability (4): 25% chance when struck to grant nearby allies protection and regeneration for 3 seconds and resistance for 1 second. (Cooldown: 20 seconds)
Who even thought that this would be a good idea? Every twenty seconds you and all nearby allies randomly mitigate power damage by 33% for 3s and become immune to all condition effects for 1s (bear in mind this includes both damaging conditions AND things like immob that are used to set up a burst). This is only a single effect on a rune that every class has access to. In a fight where three players are all using this rune, each of these three players all have 50% protection uptime from this rune alone. This needs to be completely reworked. Even just making it only apply to yourself would be a good step to take (though a rework would be better).

Elemental Shielding: Grant 3s protection when applying an aura to yourself or an ally. No cooldown.
This was already a really solid trait for self-sustain before AoE aura spamming was a thing, now it’s just way over the top. This needs an internal cooldown (even 5s icd would make a difference to the current aura-spamming tempest without breaking the trait for other builds).

Chaotic Dampening: Chaos armor grants 5s protection. No cooldown.
This trait is largely responsible for the permanent protection uptime on bunker mesmers, much of this protection can also be shared with allies due to the Illusionary Inspiration trait. The 5s duration is needlessly long when you consider that chaos armor itself already gives protection. I’d like to see a reduction in the duration from 5s to 3-4s. Realistically if you’re being focussed with chaos armor on, you’re going to get at least 1 proc of the 5s protection that chaos armor itself gives anyway. (For those who don’t play mesmer, bunker mesmer has plenty of access to chaos armor through 2 short cd leap finishers and 3-5 ethereal fields).

There’s probably other things I’ve missed, but these are the largest culprits of the AoE protection spam in this meta.

Lazaar.9123:

I swear, there seems to be a thread for each class that says they are overpowered.

Warriors/eles/engis are good at everything – OP nerf pls
Thieves can stealth – OP nerf pls
Mesmers can ‘shutdown’ for 10s with moa – OP nerf pls
Engis and necros have AI that require no skill – OP nerf pls
DPS guard has too many blocks considering its damage – OP nerf pls
And now power rangers that can supposedly do everything with no skill – OP nerf pls

Surely if everything is OP, then everything is balanced right?

Konakona.4130:

But but ofcorse he climbed, he is a ESL pro-player after all.

In case it wasn’t clear enough, this is not helseth

They’ve literally destroyed everything I enjoyed doing in this game.
PvP is dull and frustrating, WvW is empty and has turned into an extension of PvE, they killed solo/duo dungeons (which I very occasionally did if I needed gold).

Time to dig up my steam account…

I disagree with a lot of things here.

First of all, it’s impossible to rate best carry classes since it depends heavily on team composition (both yours and enemy). For example thief becomes a lot harder to carry with if the whole enemy team are tanky, compared to having easy targets that you can quickly +1 and kill in a few seconds.

Second of all, I would say that the two hardest classes to carry with (assuming meta builds for each class) are ele and necro. These are the two classes that depends heavily on your teammates being good, although for different reasons. For necro, you rely heavily on team support since you are the most vulnerable target in any team fight among all the meta classes. For ele, you rely on your teammates both to kill players and to rotate well. If your team zergs around as a 5 man group, there’s not really much you can do about it.

Then there’s your bottom ranking for warrior, which I disagree with. Someone playing the meta zerker gs warrior and is proficient at it will be able to win most 1v1 matchups, more importantly they can be won quickly. Greatsword also gives great mobility for +1ing and disengaging, it’s often possible to kite two players around if their skill level is lower than yours (which I assume is the case if we’re talking about carrying).

I don’t understand why you ranked thief as top when you even said yourself “ONLY if the match is somewhat close and your team only need a little push here and there”.

I can’t tell you the best carry class because I suck at all of them, but I would say that three of the top carry classes right now are engi, mesmer and warrior. But only if you have mastered the class and know how to kite and rotate. All three of these are able to win many 1v1 matchups if you’re proficient at the class, all of these can kite 2 people around and allow your team to outnumber the rest of the map. Theoretically the best way to carry is to force the enemy team to constantly 2v1 (or even 3v1) you and give your team the numbers advantage across the rest of the map. You’ll be able to force them to 2v1 you if they all die to you 1v1, particularly if they die quickly (e.g. zerker warrior).

This might sound crazy, but maybe pvp isn’t just about 1v1s?

Progressing in leagues is more luck than anything else. The way you progress a tier is basically to get 5 consecutive matchups that are in your favor, then repeat until you’re in the next division. Divisioin 4-6 are even more luck-based, requiring a larger number of consecutive good matchups to move on.

Leagues are quite literally have nothing to do with how good you are at PvP, since all matches are aimed to give 50% ratio according to MMR.

I seriously think that servers need to reserver your spot for a minute if you disconnect, so that you don’t lose progress in any major events.
I disconnected towards the end of a tequatl run today, logged back in and I was on a different map. I’ve also had a few situations in Silverwastes where I take part in all the events leading up to the breach, just to disconnect during the breach and unable to join back in due to the map being full.

Either this or you need to do something about the constant mac client crashes in highly populated events.

I hate it when 2 bunker guards kill my bunker guard, really does my head in.

I strongly believe that Bunker Guardian in its prime was one of (if not) the best builds for the game in terms of promoting healthy and skill-based gameplay.

Why?

1. It promoted active gameplay
Nearly everything a bunker guardian did rewarded actively reacting to a situation.
Expecting a heavy power damage spike on an ally? Use your protection shout or your mace block to mitigate damage.
Need to counter heavy CC pressure? Use SYG or your F3 skill to provide AoE stability.
Strong AoE on-demand condition cleanse was available, but it wasn’t enough to constantly cleanse every single condi on yourself, so smart use of these condi cleanses was promoted.
The staff 5 skill could be used both as a strong on-demand offensive and defensive support.
This thread discusses why active gameplay is no longer the case: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Meta-has-too-much-AoE-protection-uptime/first#post5883425

2. It was the best at its role but mediocre at others
During its prime, no other build came close to bunker guardian in team support. In a 4v4/5v5 situation where one team had a bunker guardian and the other team didn’t, the team with a bunker guardian had a significant advantage. While its team support was strong, its personal survivability was not the best and could die to coordinated burst or condi pressure. Certain condition builds were also capable of killing it in 1v1. It also provided strong offensive team support through might and a strong AoE CC (staff 5), but dealt very little damage itself which greatly reduced its contribution in a 1v1 or 2v2. Putting more than one bunker guardian in a team comp was not effective due to the specialisation of the role. This leads us onto the next point:

3. It promoted smart rotations from both teams
A team was greatly rewarded for having their bunker guardian in the team fights and punished heavily for having it stuck in a 1v1, to some extent even a 2v2 where it had reduced effectiveness. The team had to plan ahead in order to have their bunker guardian in as many team fights as possible. On the other hand, the enemy team could juke out their opponent and force their bunker guardian to be the last one standing on a point in a 1v1. Alternatively the enemy team could also abuse the bunker guardian’s lack of mobility by simply moving around the map faster (e.g. with a portal).
Currently we have multiple hybrid bunkers on each team, which can cope in any situation (1v1 – 5v5). This severely dumbs down rotations, since you can simply put a hybrid bunker on every point while your roamers move between the points.

We need builds like this to be back on top if the game is to become a healthy game that promotes smart and active play. Our current support builds can dish out most of their support passively with little thought (except for healing someone who is low), while also severely dumbing down the entire concept of team rotation.

Can the Account Jump Start become giftable? I’d like to gift this to a friend, but is currently not possible.

Buff force sigil, tone down fire and air.
At least with force there is actual counterplay involved with individual skills, not random massive damage from auto attacks that can’t really be predicted and dodged.

Adjust.6903:

Haven’t played mine in months.

One might say, you need to Adjust to the new meta

Can we have a ‘repeat last recipe’ button for the mystic forge? Would be extremely helpful for upgrading large quantities of materials.

TL:DR – Either remove the adrenaline gain when hit and create a separate trait for this in the Discipline line, or move this to the Grandmaster Tier.

Cleansing Ire is currently too powerful. We have two powerful functionalities built into a single trait that isn’t even Grandmaster Tier.

Functionality 1: Condition Cleanse
This function is already powerful in its own right. Without the additional adrenaline gain, it would still be able to remove conditions faster than other traits that remove conditions (Guardian Purity = 1 condition every 10 seconds, Ranger SotF = 2 conditions upon using a survival skill, elementalist Cleansing Wave = AoE 1 condition every 10-15 seconds, etc.).

Functionality 2: Adrenaline gain when hit
Another function that is already powerful in its own right. Compare this to Berserker’s Might, a Grandmaster trait in the Strength line that gives 2 adrenaline every 3 seconds while in combat. The adrenaline gain from Cleansing Ire already provides a similar adrenaline gain, with even more when being focussed on (which is also when you’d need more adrenaline for faster condition clears). Adding the condition cleanse on top of this adds unnecessary strength to an already powerful trait that is in line with a Grandmaster trait. Furthermore, this has a stupid level of synergy with Adrenal Health (regeneration that scales with adrenaline).

Solution:
Leave the trait where it is, but remove the adrenaline gain from it. Create a new trait in the Discipline line for the adrenaline gain when it and replace Thrill of the Kill (adrenaline on kill, currently not used by anyone in any game mode) with this trait. This will then force warriors to pick two out of three traits from this trait, adrenaline on shouts and 3% damage per boon on target.

Alternatively, move the trait into the Grandmaster tier. This would only really affect shout builds (i.e. the builds that have plenty of additional condition cleanse), since other warrior builds spec 6 into this line.

Frenk.5917:

Random Weird Guy.3528:

Celestial necros counter d/d eles (constant boon removal, transferring burns). Condi rangers, condi mesmers and condi engis are all capable of killing d/d eles on point, though those are hardly meta.

Condi rangers and condi engis can hardly sustain a 1v1 vs an elementalist, let alone hardcountering them on point. Condis in general CAN kill an elementalist, but I definately wouldn’t call these 2 classes “hardcounters of D/D ele”.

When I posted this response, the question was ‘who can kill a d/d ele on point’, nothing about hard countering. The OP obviously changed his question because he’s a child who didn’t get what he wanted and therefore did the childish thing and pretended that the question was different to make us all look like fools.

That being said, a good condi mesmer certainly hard counters d/d ele (unless the ele runs ds, but 99.9% of eles don’t).

The 4s cd 1.2k range piercing kill-shot isn’t enough, needs to also be unblockable like Test of Faith is.

UPDATE: So apparently true shot is unblockable. Proof that ANet listens \o/

Yeah I’m so fed up of losing a pvp match every time the enemy team has more mesmers. Oh wait…

First of all, mesmer is my second class and I agree that mesmer needed a buff to its survivability. In saying this, mesmer certainly got overbuffed. One large part of the issue is the number of powerful traits they got baseline compared to other classes. The changes I’m suggesting aren’t to destroy mesmers, but bring them a bit more in-line, it would still be more powerful than it was pre-patch with this suggested changes.

Baseline traits that I’m happy with:
Illusionary Persona – Essential trait for any type of mesmer, being able to daze someone or distort with no clones is necessary for survival as well as for some clutch interrupts. Also acts as a damage buff to the F1 and F2 shatters.
Manipulation skill range increased to 1200 – Essential for added mobility and kiting.

These two traits were in my opinion all that needed to be made baseline if you take into account other buffs mesmer got. Traits which shouldn’t have been made baseline:
Glamour mastery – First of all, nobody ever took this (except for jumping puzzles), so why they thought this was essential is beyond me. Portal recharge was good enough pre-patch for every mesmer to be using it in top-level play and give them a significant rotational upper-hand. Reducing the recharge makes this needlessly stronger. Take this trait off baseline and merge 20% reduced recharge onto the trait that makes glamours last longer.
Additional bounce – The main significance of this is added might and vuln from additional bounces of mirror blade and the auto attack of staff and staff clones. Shatter damage is already buffed, having this baseline buffs it even more. Take this trait off baseline and merge it with the staff trait that reduces recharge on staff skills.

Other things that need a look at:
Confounding suggestions – 5s cd, mantra of distraction also has the same cd between uses. This means that players don’t even need to consider the cd as long as they don’t use other dazes before the second mantra cast. This is added to the fact that being able to stun every 5 seconds is kinda ridiculous.
Possible changes – Increase cd to 10s. Get rid of the increased daze and stun duration, the trait is already powerful enough without it.
Blinding dissapation – It should be possible to evade/block/invuln this. It’s just stupid that if you evade a shatter you still get blinded.

Why are good engineers so hard to find? I’ve always struggled to find decent engineers to queue with as a team as well as play in tournaments with.

People seem to complain a lot about engineers, with a fair share of forum posts calling them OP, yet if they’re so OP then why aren’t more of them around?

When Leonardo DiCaprio rerolls to Revenant and is finally able to win an Oscar with it.

This is skill that takes out around 40% of the hp bar, while CCing you in the process, but by the time you see the animation it’s already too late to react to it.

There needs to be at least half a second of a windup animation for this attack if the damage and CC is going to remain the same, either that or the damage/cc needs to be toned down on this skill.

And before anyone says you can counter it with stability, the rev is obviously going to use it when you have either no stability or only 1-2 stacks of stability since those would be stripped easily by the attack.

Hahahahahahahaha.

Go to one of the many 1v1 servers like the rest of us do…

Bountiful theft has always been like that.

Lordrosicky.5813:

They insta-made everyone rank 80 with one patch?

I knew so many dudes who were grinding a ton to get to rank 80. Those people all quit because there was no rank system anymore.

It was maybe the strangest decision ever made. It seemed like someone who thought they knew everything about the game got giving free reign to just let their ideas run rough-shot unchecked over the game.

In fact that is what development has felt like for pvp on this game for 18 months or so. There seems no checks and balances on ideas at anet with some terrible ideas just suddenly popping up on live servers when nobody ever asked for them.

I have little hope for the expansion. It is like if ONE person (any of us) was put in charge of an aspect of the game it would suck. It is hard to find our own mistakes. Seems like collabarative development truely was just a PR exercise.

People quit because they couldn’t grind in a game that was advertised as being non-grindy? Right.

In saying that though, LEADERBOARDS LOL.

This screenshot does not prove anything, how do we know that you didn’t deserve to lose those matches? Post some videos of gameplay then we’ll talk.

First off, this isn’t a QQ thread and I can beat both builds without moa – I simply don’t understand why turrets are given an obvious advantage over minions in this regard.

Maylo.5892:

Where is the Celestial amulet nerf? Do not even tell me this is not going to be solved this patch..

This can (and has) lead to a massive discussion, but the general view seems to be that celestial amulet itself isn’t the problem with the celestial builds, might stacking is the bigger issue since these builds rely on large might stacks to deal a reasonable level of damage.

Bukkebruse.2810:

Tiny nerf to might, battle sigils made less significant, torment sigils added, no celestial changes (yet) and a lot of irrelevant changes to useless skills and traits that will remain unused after the patch.

Seems pretty meh so far, sorry.

Right. Besides the fact that celestial engis use the sigil for most of their might stacks, so it’s essentially cutting their might potential by 1/4.

Wait… PIN DOWN is the reason all warriors take longbow? /facepalm

Currently Rampage has 20 seconds of the following:

1. Very high DPS
2. Large amounts of CC (1 AoE, 1 ranged, 1 spammable daze that cleaves, 1 single target melee)
3. Perma Stability
4. High mobility due to gap closers and reduction on movement-impeding conditions
5. Tanky due to double health pool and 25% incoming damage reduction

And to top it all off, it’s only on a 120s cooldown when traited.

No other elite has access to even 4 out of 5 of those points. This form should not be able to do all five of these simultaneously, one or two of these need to be dropped.

1. Play a game of ranked PvP
2. Choose a random player from your match up. Ask them for a duel in an empty arena.
3. You must play the meta Bunker Guard spec.
Can guarantee that you will not win any of your matchups (except a really badly played zerker).
Omg buff bunker guardian pls.

Most specialisations focus on a specific area such as defense, party support, power damage, condition damage, control. This was even emphasised in the (in my opinion correct) decision to move the engineer trait Incendiary Powder from the power-focussed Explosions line to the condition-focussed Firearms line.

Now if we look at the fire line, it provides significant buffs in three seperate areas:

In the power area, we have 10% damage to burning foes, 10% damage while in fire (burning speed and fire grab are both significant sources of dps in the build), reduced cooldown on those skills and might on cantrips.

In the condition area, we have an additional fire aura per rotation (more burn), additional cleansing fire (3 stacks of burn) proccing every 32s and might on cantrips.

In the defense area we have Blinding Ashes. Now besides the burning from the fire skills, there is also the fire aura combo gained on the opposite side of the rotation that means that the blind frequency is fairly close to the 5s icd, which is a rather high blind frequency. There is also the additional condition cleanse (3 conditions every 32s).

As you can see, the fire line really gives too much to three separate areas for a single trait line. There are two ways to address this. Either knock one of these areas out of the fire line, or reduce the potency of these areas. I’ll let you decide which would be best, but increasing the icd of Blinding Ashes to around 12s would be a good start. This trait alone currently gives as much defense as half of the earth line.

P.S. For anyone who doesn’t know me, I main D/D celestial elementalist and actively play it in the NA esl scene at this point in time.

Gotta catch them dailies. #puglife

Nobody groups up in map chat anyway because it’s just a really bad way to group up. Vast majority of the time it’ll be either you carrying the other player or the other player carrying you, both of which suck.

Chaith.8256:

Justin ODell.9517:

Solstice.1097:

they are pretty rare as a whole but for some people like high MMR solo queue’ers they are not nearly as rare. we are being punished it feels like even if not true.

This is true, but you aren’t in this category. -snip-

Justin ‘Truth Bomb’ O’Dell for post of the week.

Love your involvement here, I am a big fan.

I imagine he has a lot of fun looking at our MMRs to decide whether or not someone is being genuine or just flaming for no reason :P

I wonder if he predicts the outcome of tournaments for fun using the match prediction system…

abc.5790:

Hvaran.6327:

when i join match and i see Prince Vingador (on my side) already raged how bad is our team, before the game actually started.

I saw that Prince Vingador video posted here recently I wanna meet this guy for laughs. He’s gonna love my characters in this EU acct. All lvl 2, brown armor, annoying looking and jumps a lot.

I once had a player on my team who said someone was a noob because they were jumping around a lot, no joke.

Bhawb.7408:

Nothing would be worse than cele, go for it.

Say that when invincible nomad eles/warriors become possible in PvP.

This never left? There’s a reason pure condi comps don’t exist in tournaments.

Jelzouki.4128:

It should give a movement speed bonus instead of invuln

It already gives +66% movement speed along with the invuln.

Johje Holan.4607:

Random Weird Guy.3528:

In a few months time, this guy will be posting in the PvP confessions thread “I used to think stealth was OP”.

In a few months time the PvP forum section will be flooded with “Stealth is OP” threads. PvP’ers don’t comprehend how annoying stealth is. When Stronghold comes out you will… you will…

It’s annoying, but that’s it. The extent of it’s power is to disengage and sneak past someone without them noticing. But that doesn’t make it OP, that’s merely a mechanic. Just that how blocking is a mechanic made for avoiding burst, which is obviously powerful but not OP. Or how immobilise allow you to land a burst (unless they block, lol), but that doesn’t make immobilise OP.

All these mechanics are powerful, but they are unique rather than OP.

Supreme.3164:

-Best player won’t run a meta build

I have to disagree here. The reason meta builds exist is because a top player will do well with that build and people will start copy-pasting it. The best players run a meta build because they’re the one who made that build meta.

I think what you mean is that meta builds don’t make you the best player.

bhagwad.4281:

Dahkeus.8243:

Of course people who don’t have full visibility to the back end of PvP will ask for solo q.

Asking “Would you rather queue up solo only against other solo queue people or mostly against other solo queue people” is a no brainer…

But there’s a couple missing pieces to this assumption:

1) Players often don’t accurately recognize “premades” and often assume that the other team has people who queued together while their team is all randoms. The psychological effect of negativity bias plays into this too where people are more likely to remember being paired against a strong premade than the times when they had a strong premade on their team.

2) We don’t know exactly how many people are queueing for PvP at one time.

3) We don’t know the full mechanics of the MMR system.

Because of 2 and 3, we don’t know exactly how good the queue times and matches would be in a solo Q world.

And finally, maybe a lot of people here are new or simply have forgotten, but there were a lot of problems with the reward balancing of solo Q and team Q. Before they were merged, people would often just queue for Team Q even while solo because the rewards were better.

The rewards problem is easily solved – just have the same rewards for solo and team q – like it should have been in the first place.

Lanfear.9802:

Can we get this instead of the point system we have currently? The points currently awarded seem to just favor the people who play a lot.

“seem to”