Guild Wars 2

A lot of former top players aren’t trying anymore and spend time in ranked playing fun builds over viable ones (NA). They got their titles and have no interest playing that seriously with the game in its current state.

Gizmorage.6412:

How hard is it to understand that condi thief is bad for the game not because it’s the best build, but because its design is absolutely, definitely, in every way one of the stupidest things to come to this game, on par with old turret engi. It just looks like a thing created to make new players that come into pvp quit the game. It’s silly.

Makes old players quit too. Maybe someday anet will learn that design is a part of balance.

Shouldn’t work in pvp considering the locked skill bar and reset before game start.

Hallowed ground is better retal uptime.
GS4 then leap through it for light aura (2s retal per hit / retal from symbol)
Use DH and f2 through your light fields for more light aura.

If you are in a raid, just ask the chrono to trait chaos and use their heal (chaos storm → retal) before they boonshare. They can maintain retal uptime 100% if they are good.

Sly.9518:

Reaper Alim.4176:

I stopped complaining. And joined the OP AF staff evade thief crowd. That spec don’t require much of a brain. Staff evade thief 1v1 IMO is one of the less counterable builds in small scale WvW.

Now image 3 or more roaming together. Any ways you guys should just stop complaining. And join the rest of us on the Staff Evade Daredevil overlords of small scale WvW. It’s fun to not only have 6 or more evades more then anyone else in the game, but to also have one of the highest burst in the game in a defensive mechanic.

Lulz complaining about Thieves from WvW in a PvP thread in the PvP subforum.

Completely different balance.

And it’s hilarious the tone of this thread OP states no counters to Evades, a player posts a fraction of the counters to Evades, the OP says those don’t count……..

And by the Logic of OP then no one should be able to do any damage while they are invuln, pseudo invuln or Blocking.

I don’t recall saying that.

Please don’t strawman me. Understand I’m a reasonable person who is just making what I feel is a reasonable suggestion about balance. I’ve been playing this game since launch for over 8000 games. I genuinely want pvp to be balanced and fun. The sentiment I’m voicing is shared by the vast majority of high mmr pvpers I know.

I could go into great detail about what changes the community would appreciate, but I know it would fall on deaf ears. The vitriol in this thread proves that. Its actually pretty depressing.

Honestly what I would love more than anything would be if Arenanet decided to read and consider a community designed balance suggestion document. I know my guild zlt would leap towards the challenge.

Exedore.6320:

Ragnar.4257:

Are you sure its evade+damage you dislike, or is it actually just thief?

Thief can dodge/evade with damage repeatedly in succession. Most of the abilities you listed have cooldowns and the evade was added to make the movement portion of the skill reliable.

That constant evade + damage gets to the underlying problem: tactics (builds) which require disproportionately less skill to execute than to counter.

Exactly

Ragnar.4257:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unrelenting_Assault
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rocket_Charge
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reckless_Dodge
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blurred_Frenzy
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Whirlwind_Attack
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Burning_Speed

Are you sure its evade+damage you dislike, or is it actually just thief?

Thief is the best example of the problem. Most of those skills are a problem imo.

Evade skills if they apply decent damage shouldn’t be multi-hit and shouldn’t have low cool downs. Of those skills, burning speed is the best designed. That’s because it’s damage is compressed, behind a large animation, and it has a reasonable cooldown (also consider attunement swapping with its cool down).

Chaith.8256:

Ryan.9387:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Impaling_Lotus
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vault
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bounding_Dodger

There is no counter play to an evade.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shocking_Aura
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Slick_Shoes
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Static_Shield
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sanctuary
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_Surging

There are counters, any warding effect and abilities that stun through evades

Do you really think that the evade spam no-tell bursts is good game design or are you just here to argue semantics?

Obviously you can buildwars dodge spamming thives but you miss the point.

It is bad game design.

On a high level, the game should have the effort to make a play as equal as possible to the effort to stop the play. For example, a high cd cc followed by a high cd, high cast time burst is good design. It is hard to land the burst so the player must combo it with cc. Likewise, it is hard to evade the cc (some builds). Now the game is effort-imbalanced. Big damage requires no effort to land (e.g. evade spam and steal bursts) while counterplay (predicting steal and somehow dodging everything) is prohibitively hard. This is consistent over pretty much all HoT specs.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Impaling_Lotus
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Vault
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bounding_Dodger

No defensive skill should apply significant pressure to an enemy player. There is no counter play to an evade. Until the devs release skills that are direct counters to evades, there should be no high damage evade skills. It is sad that a condi thief can kill a competent top 250 player without taking a single hit of damage. It is frustrating and makes people not want to play the game.

For what it is worth, here are some suggestions for the daredevil GM trait that would be more fun to play against.

Unhindered Combatant – Remain as is.
Bounding Dodger – Dodge skills now dodge-jump and can be chained mid air. (gives interesting mobility options to cross terrain obstacles)
Lotus Training – Dodge skills now shadowstep/teleport forward (now the thief can dodge through skills like line of warding).

As it stands right now though, fighting many of the specs in the game feel like a chore. Fights are essentially decided based on the build a player brings, and not their skill.

If any developer reads this, I implore them to personally duel an s/d condi thief so they can better understand our frustration as players.

It wouldn’t be right for a good team to get knocked out early for the sake of a worse team.

The retal uptime is the key to the build’s dps. It was necessary to test that it could be reliably maintained.

Again, I’m not a great dh player, someone with the right gear and rotations will get higher dps. I’ll try to do a realistic when I can with full equipment.

https://youtu.be/dCGYKdzrmxA

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQNAR7fnkICFChddCWBBkdil4BzaDkviUy7v+3CsKA0AqXA-ThBBABVq+DEHEgAeCAAcBAOTJIW7PK/CAcA48zP/8zPvf/93f/93SBExYA-e

Note the build editor online is not up to date. The current trait choices shown in the editor are the same spots as they are on my build. Ex Radiance GM trait has changed with the patch.

For this dps test I had my mesmer friend boonshare retaliation to test if a chrono can keep up perma retal with this build. Therefore, all boons but retal are active. Pulsing arena damage is on to trigger light aura procs for additional retal uptime. Further testing later in the day showed that mesmer running the chaos traitline can cast a traited heal skill to generate retal (6s) via chaos storm which they can boonshare.

I have no +5 power infusions and use lvl 60 sharpening stones. I also poorly execute the rotations, often using skills such as torch 4 before using Spear of Justice (10% dmg increase).

I have full confidence that an experienced DH player can hit well above 35k using proper food, infusions, and good rotations. A 1 million hp small golem can be killed with over 41k dps.

This patch puts DH well into the high tiers of raid DPS with an extremely simple rotation akin to the difficulty of condi ranger. To make best use of this build you will need perma retal and may consider swapping sword of justice for hallowed ground in pugs.

Elo – How many points do you award for a win? This “k” value has no easy answer and has been a problem in chess.

Glicko – What is the player’s variance and how does it change per game. These are also kind of guesswork.

A problem with machine learning for match making is the feedback. Lets say glicko gives red team a 30% chance to win. Assume red does win. How do we read into that? Blue could win the next two, but those matches will never be played.

It’s difficult and sometimes it seems that the best solutions are kind of weird.

Sc2 uses game metrics to aid matchmaking. Note, these graphs were made by the community.

https://m.imgur.com/GFJk3
https://m.imgur.com/jmMNR

5 shout paladin lb/gs ranger has unbeatable killing power in straight up 1v1s.
Engineer provides the strongest sustain out of the bunch and the greatest teamfight contribution.
Mesmer sage lb/sw sh gives the best rotation potential with 1v1 sustain.
Dh paladin sf / s sh has ridiculous damage with a weakness to +1s.

Since the gw2 client is installed, anet could demand whatever information they want from the client’s pc. If they can’t IP ban, they could use whatever they need from the client’s computer to ban.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Dustin.2793:

No one on top 10 in NA is throwing matches. I don’t know how people can be in such disbelief that people have a high win-rate in a dead game. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of players in MMOs are horrible at PvP. So when you combine that, with the fact that an extremely good duo will be forced into a match at 6-8 minutes, to be put with players hundreds of rating below them, is going to result in very one-sides matches. When top duos queue at the same time, it then becomes a game of who gets the vanilla staff guard, the condi thief gods, or players who are just known to guarantee you an auto-loss. So then you take turns losing 25-30 rating to only gain 6-8. That sounds fun, Woo!. I haven’t had one match this season where there were 10 good players in it.

In total I’ve had two games this season where someone deliberately threw. But in all honestly it didn’t trigger me and my duo queue partner that much because we just gain it back in 2-3 games. It’s the same thing on the EU leaderboard. They just farm noobs, what else is there to say that’s the reality.

Remember when you got removed from the season five leaderboard for match manipulation?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

These are a few problems I have with PvP in general. (NA)

1) Competitive PvP Rewards

Problem: There is a huge skill gap between the top teams, the mid tier teams, and everyone else. It takes an immense amount of effort to bring a team into the top tier. Likewise, it takes a reasonable effort to bring a team into the mid tier. That should be rewarded, but the current skill gap creates a big problem for new teams. Getting a team to the top tier takes time. I can reliably create a team and score 5th-8th in a tourney, but to hit top 4, I’d have to play for the same players for a few months. It is hard to keep teams together without any reward during that time. For example, UGO rewards prizes for the top 3 teams. Until my team can beat former ESL pro league players, we will get no reward from UGO. Likewise, in the monthly AT, we will be rewarded with 50-100g. It is hard to build teams in that environment. For mid tier players, the problem is the same. They have no hope in 3rd party tourneys, and can only reasonably hope to get 25-50g. Who will sign up for that?

Thoughts: Flatten the rewards. Make it so more players get rewards. This will create more competition because teams will feel that reaching “the money” will be possible. A healthy scene of mid tier players will revitalize the pvp scene at the top.

2) Matchmaking

Problem: It still isn’t producing very balanced matchups.

Thoughts: After you have gathered 10 players for the match. There are only 126 different ways to arrange the teams (assuming all solo players). Computationally, it is very easy to brute force the best arrangement of 10 total players. If that is too hard performance wise, at least do a couple passes through the rosters to see if any changes will reduce mmr spread. There is no reason the current system cannot have this added. I’ve read the code on the wiki.

3) Rating change after winning a match

Problem: Consider the edge case of a duo consisting of the best player in the world with the worst player in the world. They fight against a duo of two equal skilled players and over the course of a large number of games have a 50% win rate. At the end of this the best and worst player duo end up with the same rating. This clearly doesn’t reflect the actual skill of these players.

Thoughts: Everyone on the entire team gains or loses the same rating after each match. This will probably screw up the division thresholds, but will make the frustration of losing impossible matches and losing 15-20 points go away.

4) Match Manipulation

Problem: Match manipulation is rampant in the top of the leader board. If you don’t act on this, nobody will care about your leader boards.

Thoughts: Start Banning

5) AT Daily rewards

Problem: I can make more money playing ranked than ATs

Thoughts: Increase the rewards and potentially make them scale with the number of entrants.

TalleFjanten.7159:

zealex.9410:

and dev proved us that it wont happen ^^

“Using this tactic, my team could dodge potential competition by slowing down our games.”

His intention was to manipulate. Nothing stops top teams from fixing daily finals by agreeing on who to win, by throwing, aka manipulating.

Not really, exposing a potential flaw doesn’t mean I would use it. That being said, I’m glad there are brackets in the ATs.

Thanks for addressing that!

Are they arranged in the order of match completion?

You missed the way it’s actually done.

Take a duo of players on their main and sync with a single third player.

If the three players are on the same team, they try hard. The third player (on an alt) dcs if his team starts losing.

If the three players are on different teams then the alt will throw the game or dc to ensure the duo wins.

This way the duo consistently wins with no chance of losing.

5v5 ele necro rev mes thief

Solo Queue
A: Mes Thief Rev Dh
B: Necro Eng
C: War Ele

Duo queues are more about roles filed than classes played.

You won’t be getting into raids if you only use a bow.

If you care about raids more than bows, start here http://qtfy.eu/benchmarks/

Can we get an API feature to control our custom arenas? If not, can we get a feature to grab the match history from our custom arenas (players/ classes/ etc)?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQRAse7dnkICVDhlDBGdC8Dhl5Br6BsACAy7v+3A86e9oqBA-T5QGABA8EA6uMAI7PAA

This build is based off of the insane synergy of the following three traits:
Might of the Protector
Zealous Scepter
Defender’s Dogma

These traits give you,
21.75s Might (x2) when you block an attack (1s ICD)
14.50s Might (x2) when your justice passive procs with scepter out
Full justice passive charge when you block

Together these traits give you effectively 4 stacks of might every block while scepter is out. These traits combine with:

Scepter pulsing might 7.14s Might (x5) (6s ICD)
Strength runes 7.25s Might (5s ICD)
Courage 14.5s Might (2s ICD)

to give 25 stacks of might easily maintained during fights. Condi clear is excellent because of hunter’s fortification, large quantities of blocks, free second sigil choices, and a potential replacement of Judge’s Intervention with contemplation of purity.

The build can be varied to taste easily without ruining the synergy of the build.

Amulet can be varied
Second sigil is optional
Judges intervention can be replaced
Valor master trait can be varied
Dragonhunter adept trait can be varied

etc etc.

I find this build provides exceptional killing power while providing the tools necessary to stay alive in the developing condi-heavy meta. Your mileage may vary, but it may be worth a look to anyone struggling to find something except symbols that works in this meta .

More rewards for exploiters.

In PvP certainly yes. Just in the top 50 there are burn guards, Condi guards, shattered aegis gs guards, shattered aegis lb guards, symbol guards, and regular virtues guards.

Match manipulation that got people banned last season is happening still this season. I’ve had multiple games this season against ‘well known’ duo queue players where either convenient DCs happen or one of my allies intentionally throws.

To explain in some detail what is going on:

Three players are involved in the exploit. A duo queue is formed with two of the players on their main accounts (the ones to get boosted). The third player logs onto an alt that is completely anonymous and unattached to the duo queue. The three players sync in queue and when the match pops, confirm the match. Then, either two things will happen.

1) If the duo + third player are on the same team, they will try hard. If they find themselves losing, the third player will DC to prevent rating loss for the duo.

2) If the duo and third player are on another team, they third player will intentionally throw the match. This includes things such as standing still in 1v1s against the duo, leaving points empty to give free decaps, running bad builds, and just general creative throwing.

Frankly, you need to take action on this. Its horrible losing games, such as my last. My team was 490ish to 480ish. Both teams had a single cap and an ongoing fight on a decapped node on the remaining point. Against all logic, our player leaves the only point we have (with few ticks remaining to win) while the enemy team runs to the node to free decap while both players are within clear sight of each other. We lose that game and after, I notice there is a duo queue of players who were removed from the leaderboards last season for match manipulation.

This is killing the fun of pvp .These players are kitten to the community and represent the game in the worst possible way. Inaction is the worst thing you can do.

Crinn.7864:

How on earth did you manage to be interrupted while invulnerable?

I can’t think of a single thing outside of raid mechanics that pierces invul, thus no way to interrupt.

Are you sure you didn’t self interrupt with weaponswap or weapon stow?

A thief headshot me.

It should not be interruptible. An instant cast invulnerability skill should be just that. It is poorly designed in its current form.

The writing has been on the wall for years, competitive pvp in this game is dead.

Give it a shot, you might be surprised how well it works.

I tested it with a carrion necro.

761 dmg non-crit
1698 dmg crit

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQNAseTn8cCVDhFdCWdC8Dhl5B76e9oqBy3v+XBsqBsACAA-TpBEABIcCAI4IAYeZAAOEA5s/gBPAAA

I’ve taken one account to top 10 and another account to top 25 NA with this build and a support d/f ele.

This build does well in team fights. Aegis spam gives your team blocks, retaliation, and aoe damage. Shattered aegis can give you huge damage spikes. For example, shield #4 can apply damage, shattered aegis on allies you hit, and then shattered aegis again from the communal defenses trait.

Gain:
Permanent retaliation
Damage when aegis breaks

Lose:
F3 Stability/Stunbreak
F2 3/5 Condis cleared
Mobility

Courtyard.

Dh I know can win. For this fight the Dh needs to dance between range/melee and probably give up the decap.

I think mes should be able. Although off-meta, I think condi engie could do well too. Necro (although a bad rotation choice) should win.

Please consider adding a group of sigils that will boost the effects of combo finishers.

You could also consider “create an X field for 1s on weapon swap”.

If I join a run and see players doing 8k dps on ele, I’m probably going to leave. I can make a good estimate that the team will fail based on the performance of a couple attempts. At the point I know the run is a lost cause, I’m wasting my time staying in the group.

Other players see this too, and are often the better players in the group.

The underlying reason people leave groups is bad leaders. If the bad players are kicked, the good ones take note and stay. Often they will fill the empty slots with friends and you get easy kills.

Pander to the engie that does 29k dps, not the others.

The short answer is probably not.

Long answer is that druids provide buffs other classes must have to perform. Gotl, spotter, frost spirit, empowerment, etc. That alone will force druids over revs in the same way druids are taken over a healing ele.

d/d ele was the healer. Generally, every player contributed to the team’s healing.

Ex. In organized teams you would often see water fields blasted for healing.
Ex. Consider dd ele + eng + shoutbow .

I can’t give you the definitive answer, but I can give you the probable answer:

No

On a side note the whole proleague deal was super toxic for the NA community. Anet limited competition to the few teams that qualified, and any losers were left to drop dead. I was with a budding team almost ready to be really good. We won AGs, scrimmed well, even 3 capped Abjured. We didn’t qualify for proleague because a single match. There were no tournaments for my team if we didn’t qualify, so we broke up and my team died hours after the qualifier. This happened to many potentially competitive teams who didn’t get in.

The ESL/AG weekly deal was much better for the health of the PvP community. It is a shame really. Since then PvP never recovered and now with duo queue, the only way to get a fun high level match is to snipe the few good players who occasionally queue.

You get carried by that build. Watch your video and you will see mistakes that will make you cringe. Double dodging nothing, staff 5ing a staff thief and not doing any finisher etc. Nobody is going to care about a tutorial when your play is that messy.

Congrats on beating someone on the leaderboard 1v1? Druid should beat everything and stalemate the rest. Doesn’t mean you are good. Show us some data and not some cherry picked screenshots and twitch clips.

6D44DCC7-16F5-654C-9E74-50FE8155AEE6E364B183-96F5-4672-B398-25115D988456

That’s my pvp api. Maybe post yours?

Ps – Get rid of the bandicam and record using real software (obs/shadowplay/etc).
Pps – This whole persona or whatever makes you come off as some young kid. Nobody takes you seriously (379 duels lol) and that is why nobody replies to you half the time.

Edit – Not going to bump this thread to argue, but I linked a screenshot of me hitting legendary this season on ele. Just another example of some stats you can show us to prove that you are ‘elite’.

Already addressed. Anet will change it so a character change will give you a respawn time equal to your max bleedout time.

Probably the most you can do is make irl changes. Ergonomics, stretches, maybe a wrist brace. Iirc there is also some medical treatment you can pursue.

Look up how sc2 pros dealt with carpal tunnel/rsi.

Why did the matchmaking system produce this match?

Zorh, Ementon, Edison, Crysis, Ipno

All 5 proleague or former ESL players vs 5 people who stand absolutely no chance of victory. After we got stomped, our rating got stomped too.

I get these matches literally every day. I’m faced with what seems like impossible odds. How can I win these matches? Why am I punished so harshly for the inevitable loss?

I hit legendary MMR with a significant number of games (>100). Now, playing no differently, I am continuously put into teams where victory is hopeless, no matter how well I play. I’ve dropped clean off the leaderboard. In days I’ve gone from 1955 -> 1697. Have I really become so much worse as a player? From #16 NA to not ranked at all?

What is happening? Are these actually fair matches and I’m at fault? Is matchmaking at fault?

Crinn.7864:

Wolfric.9380:

Now repeat it playing elementalist ^^.

tbh ele is the best carry class behind Mesmer.

You are delusional.

Are you actually deaf Glael?

Edit: The last update to this wiki page was March 2016, so maybe things are different now. Hopefully this page isn’t up to date.

From https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

while red.players < config.teamSize or blue.players < config.teamSize:
chosen = None
if shouldPopulateRed(red, blue, config):
chosen = pickRoster(red, maxLadder, maxRosterSize, potentials, config)
else:
chosen = pickRoster(blue, maxLadder, maxRosterSize, potentials, config)
if chosen is None:
break

Why are the teams not filled red/blue/red/blue?

Do what I do and just leave the point empty. Don’t even cap it.

It will drive your allies through the roof, but eventually they will learn your playstyle.