Guild Wars 2

Sabre.1275:

This is a class that can stealth repeatedly, choose its opponent, and always escape a losing battle. I have seen a build where the player is nearly permanently stealthed, only popping out of stealth for about two seconds at a time, in which he cripples you, puts poison on you, and takes down about half your life. He can also call in a thief npc to do even more damage while hes invisible. There is no counter to stealth. It is a broken mechanic. It is no coincidence that mesmers are also one of the best classes in the game due to stealth. Thief are particularly overpowered in 1on1 engagements and in hot join pvp, and are slightly more balanced in 5on5 tournament pvp but are still a top tier class even there. They need to make serious changes to how stealth works or pvp will be even more dead then it is now.

There are only a few stealth skills and they all have high cool downs. Cloak and Dagger requires you to be in melee range and has a high initiative cost. “Thief are particularly overpowered in 1on1 engagements” you have to be joking. Thieves lose 1v1 to pretty much every single class. “It is no coincidence that mesmers are also one of the best classes in the game due to stealth.” No, Mesmers are good because of portal which allows you to guard a node without being there and timewarp which is AoE quickness for team fights. Not because they have 2 skills that stealth them.

I have no idea how this super Thief you were fighting was able to get back to back cloak and daggers while running into melee range, eating all the AoE. He must be a glass cannon if he’s taking 50% your health away every 5 seconds.

TL;DR: OP needs to L2P instead of crying on the forums.

Also FYI many top tier players consider thief to be lackluster and most teams don’t even use one.

The real problem is that Hotjoin isn’t fun. Hotjoin is a low rank zergfest populated 80% by thieves and people running around with the default gear who don’t have any idea how to play. There is no incentive to win, and you aren’t awarded for trying to do so.

Free Tournaments are not friendly to casuals at all, they require a small time investment to set up a group and require you to be on VOIP to have any chance at beating other teams that are. Solo queue is probably worse than hotjoin, you need to coordinate and have your whole team doing their jobs. Toss in no matchmaking, lack of features, and longish queue times… it’s no wonder PvP is dying.

Most GW2 players aren’t even interested in PvP and you expect it to become an e-sport?

You need 4 main things for e-sports to happen:

1. Easy to get in. The game need to be acceptableness any one and easy to start playing and understand basic concepts of game. At the same time it needs to be so simple that people who don’t play it can watch it and have good guess what’s going on.

2. E-sports need to be the same thing that people do while regularly playing, the skill ceiling must be infinite so people watching can see immediately why they are not pros.

3. The game must be absolutely balanced by the community finding counters to “OP” builds in a volatile shifting meta game. Changes in metagame is a main reason why people watch e-sports.

4. Spectator mode made in way that gives the spectator all the information of both teams and players and is able to seamlessly go from full overview to player perspective. The main charm is to see will a pro player do right decision with the limited information he has while the spectator already knows the all information beforehand.

^ Translated from Reddit Engrish. Full thread here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/16lxj9/esports/

E-sports are not happening anytime soon.

Add me to everything, I play Thief/Necro.

How are you guys going to pull off matchmaking when the population is so low?
How are custom servers supposed to teach people how to play?

This February patch better be worth the wait or I fear for the PvP scene which gets smaller every day.

What’s wrong with having the cool looking aesthetic items take a long time to get?

There are plenty of nice looking stuff you don’t need to play much to get.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_Engineer_bugs

Good build by a good player

Very good damage with a few “oh kitten” buttons to save you from burst

I APPROVE

urinfamousr.7631:

Seether.7285:

andyj.5809:

Bunker staff ele is unkillable.
Me and some people I play with were messing around one day, one of them plays staff bunker ele on one of his alts, he decided to see if me (burst power necro) and a friend (GS warrior) could take down his ele. We were fighting for 2 or 3 minutes before we finally got him down, all 3 of us are good players and it just wouldnt be feasable to waste that much time in a game or to kill it solo.

The reason you dont see it much anymore though is because its awkward to defend points with as it has to move around a lot.

Nice so you brought two people with limited/no poison application and limited hard ccs to take down a class the relies on healing and evasion to stay alive and you wonder why you had problems?

With your necro/warrior combo you will either correctly land your cc/burst and instantly drop the ele or he will seem unkillable if you are unable to coordinate your burst and ccs.

if it takes multiple people to coordinate their cc’s/burst just to kill 1 person then something is wrong there…

Yeah, player skill is missing.

This isn’t really the type game you play for 5-10 minutes a day.

It take 5-10 minutes for me to form up a whole group while I can do other stuff during that time and each tournament takes like 30 minutes.

Or you could just hotjoin which is intended for casual play hop in/out whenever.

What class is “unkillable” for you?
What do you think is an OP downstate?

Every MMO forum is like this.

You’ve got it all wrong. There is no lottery style of rewards in this game, well maybe there is but it’s irrelevant due to crafting. There isn’t 1 time where I’ve bought 30 gold chests trying to get an item when I can craft it for the price of 1-2 slivers.

As far as burnout, PvE is facing the same issues. The rewards in this game for both PvE and PvP are visual items (and in PvP, the competitive drive to get better and be a top player). You shouldn’t have to justify PvPing because you get “rewards”. The PvP itself is the reward.

Of course what we’re seeing at a competitive level is teams getting frustrated due to lack of competitive features. They all want to get better, and you don’t get better by playing 1 sided matches all day against ‘pro’ teams. Replays would help people see what strategies work, who isn’t pulling their weight, and what the other team did that made them win instead of yours. Detailed stats would let us see how much damage our team is doing compared to theirs. Rating helps keep competition alive and is 100% needed for a “competitive” game. It helps drive players to strive for a higher rating and get better.

Do you think nearly as many people would play LoL if it didn’t have matchmaking and rating? It’s like playing people in diamond vs bronze Starcraft.

9 PM – 2 AM EST

Sometimes earlier/later

No one is ‘protecting’ anything. Learn how to play before calling things OP.

More like: What is Anet thinking expecting unskilled players to have a deep understanding of the game and play the objective?

Hotjoin should just be elimination deathmatch, the first to team 10 wins.

What PvP rank are you?

The idea that you’re supposed to play an objective as an entire team just flies by some people I guess.

Blinding Powder: 3 second stealth 40 second CD
Cloak and Dagger: 3 second stealth, 6 initiative cost, requires melee range
Hide in Shadows: 3 second stealth, 30 second CD
Shadow Refuge: 10 second stealth, 60 second CD, requires the thief to sit inside it for the full 5 second duration

Which is these is OP again?

We had them for Halloween and I know there’s PvE weapons, so why aren’t they in PvP?

Too bad it took Anet 1 week to put Tixx in the Mists…

When I talk to him it says that I’ve already received the gift when I haven’t. Chest is empty.

Not sure if this is because I already got it from PvE.

Kakeru.2873:

As the title says, I am severely disappointed with SPVP, TPVP and WvWvW in it’s current state. It is simplistic, extremely repetitive and extremely slow and boring.

I’m played many MMOs over the years, and always loved to PvP, In Aion as my assassin, In Wow as my Druid Cat, in Rift as a bard/assassin…………. the list goes on and on.
Now why I say GW2 has the worst pvp I have ever played it for these 4 reasons.

1: Downed State adds nothing to actual PvP, it was maybe intended as some sort of teamplay mechanic with no holy trinity but instead is just a unbalanced mess. There’s a reason no other PVP game has this horrible mechanic it shouldn’t be in PVP.

2: Limited, VERY limited build variety, GW2 has got to be the most rigid, simplistc game I have played in years when it comes to character building, the only builds seen are bunker guard/eles (i played guard) and Burst ranger/warrior/theif. There is no variation in this game it’s either be built to kill someone in 2 seconds or be built to last longer than 2 seconds.

3: Combat, My main reason why GW2 PVP is the worst i’ve ever played. It’s floaty, shallow and slow. Coming from Aion were, like GW2 an assassin can kill you within a few seconds, in Aion you can actually counter or are actually given the tools to avoid that. You can block spells, Break Aether Hold, Parry, Block attacks, are given situational skills that add depth to combat. Not Gw2 where as a guardian which is based around being a protector, I have 3 blocking skills, and they trigger NOTHING they simply block the next attack and go on cooldown. I don’t get the ability to counter their attack after block or use a skill that can only be used after blocking, no just block and wait for my cool downs to come back.

4: Combat is cooldowns, cooldowns, cooldowns. With this being the such a big aspect of GW2 combat it makes PVP boring and shallow my worry in combat is waiting for my cooldowns, with no conditional skills or abilities like "If stunned, press F6 to push back all foes " the combat is paper thin and simple.

Maybe i’m used to having to use 50+ skills and consider every option when fighting different classes not having the same bunker build that require no chance because it’s so stupidly effective.

Maybe i’m use to actually having to think in combat other than capture a point and hold my ground for the 1000+ time.

It’s funny the devs even stated they wanted to make combat as dynamic and simple as possible because they didn’t want the balancing problem like in GW1 , but not only is the combat simple, boring and slow it’s unbalanced as well.

1. Downstate is fine and adds another layer of strategy to the game.

2. Agree, there is a distinct lack of viable builds but there is a TON of build diversity and we will begin to see that once everything is balanced.

3. I don’t know what you expected from a game balanced around a conquest game mode. You have your standard DPS/Tanks with variations between them. As far as the “depth” you’re talking about, GW2 has the dodge mechanic.. Skills are all VERY situational and some of them can turn the fight in your favor.

4. Isn’t it like that in every MMO? I don’t see how relying on cool downs is an issue.

“Maybe i’m used to having to use 50+ skills and consider every option when fighting different classes not having the same bunker build that require no chance because it’s so stupidly effective.”

You’re right, bunker builds are strong 1v1. That’s the point, they’re supposed to be able to hold a node once you win the fight at that point. They can be killed very easily in around 30 seconds in a 2v1 and if your team isn’t there to support you, you will lose that point.

“Maybe i’m use to actually having to think in combat other than capture a point and hold my ground for the 1000+ time”

You’ve gotta be kidding here. There is tons of thought that goes into combat including targeting, positioning, who to focus, stomping, rezzing, bursting, healing, combo fields…

Leave the balance talk to the best players/top teams and ArenaNet.

Unfortunately there is a huge lack of viable builds in PvP. Pretty much your only viable options are:

Ranger: Traps, Double invulnerability glass cannon
Warrior: 100b, High damage Mace/Axe cc
Thief: Backstab, Deathblossom
Necromancer: Power Wells, Tanky conditions, Power Melee
Mesmer: Shatter, Phantasm
Engineer: Rifle bunker, Conditions
Guardian: Bunker, DPS
Elementalist: Bunker, DPS

Many of these builds are sub-par and do not bring nearly as much to a team as the popular builds.

I for one am tired of seeing everyone with copy/paste builds because they’re the most effective. I’m tired of seeing every team use a Mesmer/Guardian because no one can fill their roles better.

It’s more of a annoyance than it is helpful, especially when skills are accidentally cast or cast instantly in down state.

It also removes these macros to stop people from queuing 10 skills and having them fire off faster than humanly possible.

How does Anet feel about very high rated players playing low rated ones (basically what we have now)?

The way the population is now, if matchmaking is too strict queues will never pop outside of peak hours like we are seeing with Paids.

In tournaments it’s always 15 seconds.

In hotjoin spawn timers are at 18, 38, 58

So if you die at 23 your timer will be 5 seconds.

Maybe have rank vendors sell increasingly better rewards that can be sold in PvE and allow gold to be converted into glory at a 50% rate or something.

PvE being linked to PvP will help encourage people to play more.

AKA something to do other than AFK in mists between queues. Get on it, Anet.

Small rewards would be nice too.

Lol.

Warrior gets outranged while you whittle him down with shortbow then steal heartseeker for 10k burst. No smart thief will try to fight in melee range. If he’s going to be an idiot and try and melee you with blinds just step out of it and wreck him.

The people that warrior was fighting would have killed him in 15 seconds if they were decent players.

@OP not sure if you’re trolling or you’re just incapable of using your 5 seconds of knockdowns on a glass cannon thief and killing him in 5 hits.

The tryout seems a little silly…

Anyone can Bulls charge frenzy endure pain and kill svanir/chief in 15 seconds.

SPvP is very flawed and I think we all realize it. You need to understand that this is the mode 95% of new players are going to play, and an outstanding majority ONLY plays hotjoins. If a new players hates 8v8 (“This is all PvP has to offer?”) why would they want to try play a tournament?

Hotjoin has devolved into a glory farming zergfest. Most players don’t care about winning, only about points. Why? Because there are no meaningful rewards or incentives to win, other than an extremely small glory bonus.

Lists of changes:
*First off, award players for winning. I think a glory bonus of 1.5x or 1.3x for everyone on the winning team will encourage people to try and win.

*Reduce team score from killing a player from 5 points to 3 (Not the glory you receive, the amount that is added to the total score on top) this helps reduce the snowballing we see in matches where one team is spawn killing the other.

*Award players for back capping. If a single player decaps/converts a node they should receive double the regular glory (20 for a decap 20 for a capture) but if another player comes onto the point they will both receive the regular bonus.

*If you have stepped on a node that is captured for your team in the past 10 seconds you’ll receive the 10 glory you normally would have if you had stayed on the point. This will stop 5 people from all standing on a point just to capture it and get the glory.

*Every player who is standing on a node that you own but is being contested (You are red, they’re blue standing on a red node) you will receive 2 glory every 3 seconds.

*To prevent possible abuse of this, glory will only be awarded in games that have 5 players or more in them.

Thoughts on these changes?

If anything, we need some communication. At least acknowledge that these things are broken and that you’re working on them, and give us an ETA.

We haven’t had a serious PvP update since October, and the only thing that really did was fix block bug and Svanir runes, which are still bugged on Necro. These things essentially created a meta where EVERYONE was running them for 2-3 weeks before you guys “fixed” it.

Don’t even make me bring up the loadscreen bug, which was patched ONCE and then came back AGAIN to be ignored for another 2 weeks.

The past PvP patches for 2 months have been much delayed bug fixes and underwater combat tweaks and haven’t addressed any of the issues with balance in PvP at all.

Also, what’s with no holiday weapons?

Idk, maybe you guys really don’t care about PvP at all.

There’s a total of 4 teams I can think of NA that are actually active and around 1-2 sets going during peak, outside of peak hours there are absolutely no paids (9 PM – 12 AM sometimes goes early into the morning 1 or 2 AM)

Even free tourneys are being sluggish, if you miss the queue they can sometimes take upwards of 5 minutes.

So pretty much, how many teams are there? What are queue times like, how many sets doing paid, what are peak hours and do you guys get paid queues outside of them?

I’m convinced Anet doesn’t take PvP seriously and will continue to only focus on PvE until everyone there gets bored and goes to the next big game changing MMO.

Everyone knows why this game’s PvP has failed but until Anet does something about it, it will continue in this downward spiral.

WvW is more competitive than PvP right now.

So this isn’t going smoothly I take it?

Can we get an ETA on patch please… Halloween update was just like this.

That stealth patch :o
Your weapons are locked after the 10 second pre-game.

Edit: Includes amulets.

Class/race/gender distribution in hotjoin and tournaments, % of players who are “x” rank, most common class builds, PvP population growth/reduction?

Because there’s no reasons for these competitive players to stick around when there are alternatives out there that. The MMO market is a tough one and new games these days have to have certain standards, they need to be better than the competition.

In regards to a game that has high hopes of being an e-sport, not having crucial competitive features 4 months into launch is unacceptable for most players which is why we see such low numbers in PvP.

Turn up your gamma, it’s barely visible but if you look closely you can make out a trollface above the node.

Going on a little bit of a rant here, bear with me. A lot of good points are brought up that need to be addressed.

NA PvP is in a deplorable state, there are only 3 (4?) established teams. Why is this? Every single team that has tried to get into the game has gotten tired of playing an “esport” game without rating, spectator, cash tournaments etc and they’ve all quit.

Entire PvP guilds that were flourishing at launch are now ghost towns.
Heart of the Mists outside of Anvil Rock is deserted.
Lack of NECESSARY features for a competitive game (I don’t need to say anything here)

The casual players aren’t happy either. Aside from them getting bored of the same mode/small selection of maps, they’re thrown into a game that’s so counter-intuitive to skill progression it isn’t even funny. Anyone wonder why we see threads about Thieves/Mesmers/Bunkers/Warriors pop up every day? This is part of basic game design. You need to have a game that’s not only balanced at the pro level but is also balanced at entry level. Easy to learn, hard to master. There are also no rewards outside of cosmetic items, which is fine for some people and a problem for a majority. Give us SOMETHING that’s useful in areas other than PvP. This will definitely help pique interest in sPvP.

Lack of a matchmaking system doesn’t help. Would you like to be thrown against the top 100 players in Starcraft 2 from the time you pick up the game until the time you get sick of losing every game and leave? Because that’s how paids work right now. There are such outrageous queue times because people don’t want to waste extremely hard to acquire tickets so they can lose to the same team over and over.

Hotjoins are honestly just dreadful. You either hop in with the zerg and farm glory because there are no incentives to win/play the objective or you get mobbed by the 5 thieves on the enemy team. You lose either way.

What’s that? You want to break away from the mindless glory farming zergfest to play competitive tournaments? I hope you enjoy losing against premades, unless by some miracle you find a group willing to take a new player in and teach them (not happening).

The last thing I’ll touch on is stream viewership. I don’t think this game is all that fun to watch for many reasons, but I believe the majority of people just aren’t interested in watching or even playing PvP. Stream viewship is pathetic right now compared to what it was at launch, we had single streams reaching 600-1000 viewers regularly (and I’m not talking about internet celebrities, new no-body streamers)

Interest in PvP has just disappeared. Where have all the PvP podcasts gone? The video build guides? Tournament commentary?

We need changes and we need them NOW. So many people have already jumped ship but I still have faith that you can turn it around, Anet. A lot of us had such high hopes for PvP and it hurts us to see it in it’s current state.

All signet rezzes have insane cast times and can be interrupted (the only exception is an ele who uses stability, the cast time is still 5 seconds and a stomp can easily happen in that time).

The motivation is appearance/skill.

The same can be said about PvE, a lot of players get to 80 and say “o well now there’s nothing to do” motivation in this game comes from aesthetic items not from a never-ending gear grind treadmill. If that’s not enough for you, you won’t be here long.

Not saying OPs reasons aren’t valid, we do need ladders/spectator and all that for a strong competitive community.

Ranger: Kimora
Necro: Gronzy
Mesmer: Powerr
Thief: Hman
Warrior: Vyndetta
Engineer: Erho (RIP)
Elementalist: Xyrkain
Guardian: Khalifa

I’m sad no one knows me :c

edruviransu.1029:

When playing gs warrior, how do I contribute in team fights? In team fights, I tend to have difficulty contributing to damage without dying myself. Obviously, once someone gets low, bursting them contributes, or hundred blades to prevent a res, but until we get someone low, what should I be doing?

Additionally, should I be building more defensively? I currently usually go 20/30/0/0/20 with divinity runes and zerker’s amulet with soldier’s jewel.

Imo the hardest thing about playing a glass warrior is timing your burst correctly. You miss it and you’ll have a very hard time doing much in the fight but if you land it, it can be game changing.

Stay around the edges of the fight and always target the Necro if they have one, if not go for their main source of damage (thief, other warrior etc). Necros can be devastating if you let them sit and spam their AoEs and warrior is probably the best Necro counter out there. Use your 3/4 abilities a lot, both skills can do a huge amount of AoE damage in the center of a fight and Whirlwind acts as a long dodge.

I usually save my Frenzy 100b for when someone goes down, I pop balanced stance so I don’t get cc’d off and if you can catch 2-3 people in there you’re doing your team a huge favor. Not only will you kill the downed guy but you’ll be doing a ton of AoE to anyone rezzing him possibly downing another 1 or 2. If people just aren’t getting low you can bait a stunbreaker and then go in for the Frenzy 100b keep in mind you won’t have it for the rest of the fight.

Alternatively if one of your guys goes down and you see a lot of people going in for the stomp you can Frenzy 100b the pile and it’s just as effective.

As far as your build feel free to go as glass as possible if you plan to be playing a bursty build. Any survivability is a waste imo because it won’t do much to help you from being bursted.

Also consider getting the 10 trait that immobilizes on cripple, you can use it to chain cc someone and get part of a 100b off or use it as a gap closer if they’re kiting you around.

Shukran.4851:

why do all classes except for ELE can swap weapon freely out of combat while ELE has still attunements cd ?
if you think about engi, he still have at max 3 secs to swap toolkit.(engi afaik is the only class who don’t have cd for swapping. op)

My only guess would be so that it doesn’t interfere with “On swap” attunement bonuses that elementalists have in their trait tree (there’s a few)

So for example, ele would not be able to swap back and forth between air/fire out of combat and get infinite swiftness and might stacks.

Anshard.3489:

Hmmm, fair enough, let me give this a try.

I would like to know why 100bs isn’t OP. How does one deal with it in casual play?

Please keep in mind I am not interested in 1v1. That is easy, but also only makes up a extremely minor fraction of PvP.

100b will literally take your health down from full to 0 if you let it. The thing about warrior is that you have to consider how fragile he is. If he misses that 100b burst or doesn’t time it right, nearly all his burst is negated and he’s going to have a very hard time staying alive in fights due to his low survivability and vulnerability to control effects (cripple, stun, etc).

The counter to 100b is simple, the easiest way is to just dodge out of the way. There are a few tells that the warrior has such as the rage animation/signet animation that are dead giveaways he’s about to bulls charge you. Abilities like the Thief’s shortbow 3 are very good at this as you can spam dodge over and over.

Of course you can’t always see him coming. This is where stunbreaks come in, and they’re a hard counter to heavy burst. Every class has a stun breaker utility and they’re practically required to have a good balanced build regardless of role. If the warrior catches you off guard (you don’t see him coming) and lands his combo it’s up to you to use that stunbreak and dodge out of the way. You WILL take some damage but it won’t be a very big deal. Players with great reflexes are able to stunbreak before any serious damage is done. Be careful to save it during fights for when you really need it, because a good warrior will wait until you’ve used all your stunbreaks and then charge you.

There are other classes who don’t need to use stunbreaks to deal with 100b such as Necro using deathshroud/plague form/blind well but that’s class specific.

DoYourBestBear.6810:

Threads that have a tone similar to this, is why we can’t have nice things and creates an unnecessary barrier to entry.

I disagree, I would’ve been very grateful if there were experienced players around to help answer questions and clear things up me when I first started. I agree that there’s a huge gap of knowledge between new and experienced players but that’s largely due to no form of matchmaking. A lot of people have already talked about this so I won’t go into detail but the devs are aware.

There are definitely learning resources out there, albeit few. The real issue lies with natural progression, it’s very hard for people to pick up things in this game just by playing. Sure, get to rank 30 and you already have a good idea of how PvP works but the experienced players aren’t the ones making these threads because they’re the ones who understand how the game works. Threads like these are made by people who load up PvP and get instant killed by a backstab thief as they walk out of spawn.

@sataarcoeny Qts have broad shoulders so they carry the team. He gets loads of points from being a fearless mesmer and killing everyone on the point in 1 shatter combo.

@zone I haven’t experienced any weapon swapping issues (I don’t use fast hands but it only reduces the swap CD by 5 seconds when in combat iirc)