Guild Wars 2

Some thoughts from PVP perspective:

Stability counters this spec hard. It would be ideal to see dagger get a single boon strip without needed to disable to allow for some counter play.

It would be nice to see dagger get either a ranged attack or a pull similar to DH, it is just too easy to kite right now.

Discipline trait line seems mandatory for the 25% move speed if you want to take natural healing due to not being able to upkeep swiftness. The issue is that there is no pure power-based 25% MS rune.

Teams who run engis and longbow warriors into RIP kitten themselves hard.

Running a necro into lb war + celestial engi necro is what gives them their edge as not only can the necro stall points with its insane health pool, but it also actively counters 1/2 of most teams.

They run the best sustain comp possible and are really kitten good at it. You will only beat them with a well played mirror match up or with a comp that can out kill them.

That means old school team fight high dps comp with mobility utility, focus on collapsing hard and holding 2. Let the kills you get off of their far pushes make up for the points.

Best comp to do this IMO would be:

D/D Ele, DPS Guardian, Anti-Condi Necro, Shatter Mesmer, D/P Thief.

D/D Ele is for support, stomps, and might in the bigger team fights. It’s sustain means you can also leave it out to dry a bit if you have to over commit home.

DPS Guardian + Mesmer fill in each others weaknesses pretty well. Mesmer provides boon strips and mobility. DPS Guard has condi removal, stomps, and counters thief for the mesmer.

Anti-Condi necro provides a 5g counter, provides condi removal for the mesmer and boon strips for the guardian.

D/P Thief just +1s fights and provides a small amount of boon strip for the dps guardian.

Liberis.9573:

I am much more interested in Stronghold than Conquest, and I don’t want to have to dodge queues in order to play it exclusively.

Thanks for your time.

This, please make it it’s own queue.

-OR- at the very least commit to making it a seperate queue when/if the demand is met.

A lot of people have been let down slightly today, many of us were expecting a new premir game mode that would grow with more maps to replace conquest. The way you are talking about it now sounds as if it will be just like Courtyard; a one off for fun that will have no growth.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Super Riceman.8702:

3. Add a way to spectate tournament games but make it delayed by 5 min instead of watching it live.

Since it’s late and I’m here, want to quickly debunk this one. This is like a year+ work minimum for an entire team of engineers, and may not even be feasible in our game engine.

Just to give some perspective on why stuff that often seems so easy to do, often times isn’t being done.

In general great thread though folks, keep the suggestions rolling =)

It’s dev quotes like these that dishearten me the msot.

How many times have you guys said that you were/are trying to build a game that can grow into a viable e-sport? If your intentions truely are to build a esport class game as promised then how is this a valid excuse in the least bit?

You have enough people on the payroll to fund multiple PvE living world teams, that is clearly important to you, but to put a team on a long term project that would be a gigantic assest to PvP is unrealistic? I don’t recall Riot Games saying “oh, you know what we could make a replay/spectator mode but we don’t want to invest the resources”.

In this day and age you can not half kitten competitive gaming. There are too many other options for people wanting to be involved in esports. Either commit to it, or stop dangeling the proverbial carrot in front of our noses.

It is unacceptable to hear about a lack of resources while PvE gets massive content patches bi weekly.

It is unacceptable to hear about not being able to balance certain builds because it would affect PvE and WvW.

It is unacceptable to cry out esports while still not having the daily, montly, and annual tournament system we were promised at lanuch, 1 year ago.

You have the resources, you just choose to allocate them largley not towarards competitive gaming. You show your priorites every patch with the content that is put out, and sPvP is not a major one in the least bit. You mentioned not adding multiple game modes to PvP in fear or spreading your player base too thin; I think there is some great advice in that for yourselves at Anet. By trying to have a game with WvW, sPvP, and PvE you are spreading yourselves too thin and you are not giving sPvP the attention needed to create this e-sport that you hooked a large majority of us in with.

Warrior is still in a terrible spot all things considering. It is just really good at killing spirit rangers, engis, and does ok against necros as the popular builds for these classes have no stab, little to no break stuns, and are shut down by zerkers stance.

Warrior works much better in solo queue than in team queue because it is much more skirmish based and is packed full of these classes it does well against. Also, the lack of team play in solo queue leads to fewer bunkers and annoying linebackers to shut you down in large team fights.

The class still has some huge issues against things like mesmers, ele’s, guardians, and in large team fights, these things just are not prevelant in yolo queue.

From Anets main page too:
Format

Regional Qualifying Tournaments
Single match elimination
Teams of five players competing in five vs. five matches
Matches consist of a best two out of three games
Map rotation:
Forest of Niflhel
Legacy of the Foefire
Battle of Kyhlo

Link: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-invitational-and-regional-qualifying-tournament-details/

Mist Leauge changes thier rules every other week and you didn’t expect a tournament ran by ML to have rule changes mid tournament? What were you thinking!

If the super quaggan event has a 10k prize pool I’m sure teams will want to practice for it the same.

No one wants to take temple away forever…

The thing is there are qualifiers for the biggest tournament Gw2 has had yet coming up.

While in an ideal world every team wanting to compete would have hours of scrim practices lined up on private servers this is not the case. Its hard to find scrim partners and even harder to find ones that are ok with crushing you into the ground for a few games while you test out new ideas and strats.

As of right now automated tournaments are the best way to get quantity over quality practice. I, along with many other players enjoy temple, but it’s not included in the upcoming tournament so in order to have teams be prepared as they can be it would be good to have it skipped… this one time.

This isn’t Sc2 where we can simply veto a map not included in our upcoming tournament, nor is it a random map each time. Devoting 4/8 days before the biggest tournament in gw2 yet is terrible for the competitive community.

bullet points

- Necros damage is over the top with the addition of burning in high condi damage builds
- For how much damage necros do they have too much survivability. This is because they get most of their damage from traits so can devote utilies to things like specral wall, armor, and/or walk.

- Weakness is too strong, this makes necros stronger
- Necro + Spirit ranger is the real problem. Almost perma AoE burning from marks and sun spirit
-Storm spirit does too much damage

-CC warriors are great counters to necros, however suffer in team fights as they can get peeled and can not swap targets fast enough like an Ele.

Will provide VoDs if you PM me back

Weakness is also a HUGE issue and Necro’s happen to be the biggest appliers of the condition.

Post buff weakness would, at most, reduce over all DPS by 25% on a player with a 0% crit rate. This ofcoarse wasn’t good as most direct damage builds could get 30-50% crit chance with ease making the over all damage reduction some where between 17.5-12.5% if not worse (assuming 200% crit damage).

Post buff weakness reduces DPS by 25% AT A MINIMUM. The problem is that you can not get a critical hit and glancing blow at the same time and glancings now take priority. If the hit was going to be a crit but glances instead now you deal 1/4 the damage you would have done, a 75% reduction. It’s WAY to much. Again lets look at someone with 30-50% crit chance and 200% crit damage. Someone with 30% crit chance gets a 29% DPS recuction and someone with a 50% crit gets a 31% DPS reduction (not including gains from on-crits).

Nothing in the game can grant such a huge DPS increase. The only thing that would be close would be quickness, but the upkeep on quickness was is not nearly long enough to compete in the long run. 25 stacks of vun can’t even match it, and 25 stacks of vun is much harder to apply and upkeep than weakness.

Not only is the reduction too much, but it just adds another, very impactful, level of RNG to combat. Did my tripple hit phoenix crit? Did it not? Did all 3 hits glancing? Would those glancing his been crits? It’s terrible and makes it nearly impossible to make good judgment calls when you have weakness on you.

There are several ways to fix this, but something needs to be done.

I suggest making it a flat 15-25% damage reduction to reduce the RNG.

Or, as it was stated that they wanted weakness to counter crit builds. Make it so glancings ONLY effect crits, and reduce them to base damage at 50% chance. As it stands there isn’t a lot of thought behind weakness, you see a build that revoles around dirrect damage and you slap weakness on it. Before, if you used weakness on a high crit target it did next to nothing, there should be some form of counter play.

Lastly you could just reduce the reduction to 33% and reduce some of the weakness durrations.

As it stands weakness is a huge issue and it only compounding necro balance issues.

Far from a “vacuum” as you put it. A PTR as I suggested incompases all aspects of the game. If devs are worried about a particular PvE instance then swap it in. The point of it is to TEST balance changes, not for devs to get lazy and not consider all possible consequences before they push the patch to the PTR.

Concerns like you bring up have to already be thought of by the devs, adding a PTR does not add additional consequence to balance changes, rahter it keeps things from slipping through the cracks and allows devs to have a sandbox to test things in that they would not on live servers.

Your last statement makes no sense.

Varonth.5830:

It will most likely either end up:

• PTR is a complete wasteland (I have seen my fair share of these types of PTR servers)
• or PTR is used, and the forum is flooded with non patch related stuff, useless discussion etc

And on another node, how should a PTR work, when we are getting content updates every 2 weeks?
Patching the PTR a week before release of that content?
Patching the PTR 2 weeks before release of that content? So bazaar of the four winds hits live and at the same time we can play Cuttthrout Politics on the PTR giving away all the secrets?
Ok not that bad in case of these 2 updates, but Dragon Bash hitting live, and at the same time throwing out that 2 weeks later one member of the Lion’s Arch council is dead and the Aetherblades attacked…
And how many changes can and will be done a week prior to a major update.
From the point of view of a computer science student… in such a big project with hundreds of people involved? Not alot if it is working at that moment. If it is broken in terms of program crashing… yeah then you might throw ressources at that problem.

GW2 has it even harder in that regard, as alot of the content updates so far build upon each other.
So postponing a content update is not a viable solution either, as it would postpone all the other content updates.
Stripping out new features (like balancing changes) has alot of potentional to break other things, so that needs time to test aswell.

With such a strong emphasize on storytelling etc. in mind, a PTR just doesn’t seem like something ANet will ever do.

So don’t include PvE and Living world content in PTR? Not ALL conetent has to be pubished to it. Simply include a portal to WvW, some tournaments, hot join, and a portal to popular PvE instances so BALANCE testing can be done for all areas of the game, not QA/Bug testing.

Pyriall.5027:

So EVERYONE is saying those things right? Not just “high” tiered players? I think that is safe to assume that anyone with a reasonable mind can have a say in the balance discussion, not just those looking to segregate the community into “tiered” levels.

And yes, if you’ve played the game it’s pretty evident.

Lets break this down:

Pyriall.5027:

I think that is safe to assume that anyone with a reasonable mind can have a say in the balance discussion

Do you think a bronze level LoL player would have been suggesting the shift from Resistance based defense to HP based defense between seasons 2 and 3?

Do you think a bronze level player would understand the cause and impact of the support items being shifted to junglers in S3?

Do you think a silver level Sc2 player understands why void rays have not been nerfed yet dominate him every game against a protoss?

The answer here for the large majority is no. Unless you follow a game thoroughly (watch ever LCS/WCS match ect.) there is no way a low “tier” player will comprehend enough about the highest levels of play because they have not experienced it.

Pyriall.5027:

not just those looking to segregate the community into “tiered” levels.

No one is looking to segregate anything. It just so happens that some players put more time into the game and are better at it. These are “top tier” players. There is no push to create some super elities top tier group, it just happens nauturally.

Pyriall.5027:

They’ve stated that they speak regularly to “top” players. Which brings this discussion full circle as to how do they define these top players given that most of the times you have players jockeying for buffs to their profession of choice.

This isn’t even remotely true. There really isn’t much else to say about that.

There’s a pretty big difference between teams who run “fotm” (read as strong) builds and incorperate them into good solid play and teams who run 2 spirit rangers and 2 necros to just faceroll for wins.

Good teams will run strong builds because good teams want to win. However, you wont see good teams jump ship and run comps that by all means should be terrible just because the builds are broken as can be.

Double spirit ranger, double necro, gaurdian by all means is a terrible terrible comp. It has low time to kill, is nearly purely condi based, has very little team utility, very little stomp utility, terrible mobility. Ect, ect ect. It works because spirit rangers and necros are just absurdly broken, esp. when paired together. The builds are so good that they counter what should be their counters.

I havn’t seen a single “top” team not running strong/fotm builds. EU meta is (from what ive head) S/D Thief, Necro, Bunker Guard, Spirit Ranger/Engi, and an Ele. Just about every NA team is running simmilar, TDM runs that build, RNG drops and ele for a GS mesmer, ect. the problem isn’t that top teams refuse to run strong builds. The problem is top teams refuse to degrade play into passive condi spam that by all means should not work and should be getting nerfed soon.

Karl McLain.5604:

Hey all! Poison is indeed not currently working as intended (though there are some instances where it will still reduce healing). We’re aware of the issue and it will be fixed in an upcoming patch.
-Karl

And weakness?

The notion that people are upset that Anet finnaly did an actual balance patch is moronic at best.

People embranced the patch and the slight speed up to the “slow and steady”, we need more balance patches like it, many more, to get this game into competitive shape.

The problem was not the patch, but the fact that 1 month later and there has not been a single impactful nerf to the things they over buffed OR fix to bugs that they introduced. Big balance patches are good, especially for a game needing so much itteration to become more competitive. Big balance changes followed by weeks of silence are NOT good. The fact that the games first major tourny is a week away only compounds peoples frustrations.

Do any even remotley “top” pvpers think this meta is decent in the least bit?

It’s a joke.

Necro is more OP than ANYTHING ever was in beta.

Poision bug makes it so its almost impossible to out down 2-3 man resses.

At the very least these two things HAVE to be fixes before this next weekend. It’s a joke and frustrating as hell.

RaZaC.1963:

• Poison (currently does not affect heals/rez);

Fix this for the love of god.

100% Yes.

It’s time thieves go through a number of changes to move them away from the hyper gimmick builds they run to more well rounded ones. This does require nerfs (like the one suggested) but also buffs in return.

I wish thief players would stop getting out thier pitch forks every time something that might hurt their class is suggested. Would you guys really not like to see your class moved to an over all better state for both thief and non thief players? … Does-not-compute.

There seems to be a lot of talk about offensive-ish guardians. Seeing as I played one for 5+ months and was one of the only ones NA (kaypud was the other that comes to mind) I have a pretty decent grasp on the subject.

There are 2 big issues with the specs that keep it from seeing competative play.

1 – condi removal
2 – swiftness/passive speed buffs

On the topic of condi removal the guardian, like the warrior, is subject to massive amounts of condi cleave. As a melee class you have to focus on chill, cripple, and weakness to allow you do just do damage, but if you waste removals on those then you die to poision, bleed, burn. The way bunkers survive condi clear is via shout build + 20 into virtures wich force you into vit armor and 30 points into the vit tree. People have toyed with an “offensive” shout guardian, and it works good enough for hot join, but it lacks mobility and damage for tPvP. Then again shouts are much more of a team support-esq skill so they really shouldn’t be super offensive. There are 2 ways to fix this: remove shout runes from the game and make the extra condi clear part of teh t3 traits for warriors and guardians OR (and this is the better solution I feel) buff non-shout removal. Smite condi buff would be huge here, something like doubleish the recharge, remove up to 3 condi deal extra damage for each one. Try to keep the DPS about the same but make it so it can remove covered condis. While your at it, meditation traits need to be more compact so you don’t speed all 3 tiers just making medis worth while. Either move the instant cast in like with the 20% cd OR make instant cast base functionality of smite condi.

The other problem with guardian is that they are easily kited in team fights. While the class should not be a super roamer like thief or ele, it needs more access to swiftness and a passive 15-25% speed buff some how (when traited). This problem can be worked around(kinda) with runes like Pack or Speed… but they arn’t good enough, and again if you are forced into shouts you can not take them. Retreat has WAY to long of a CD. Aegis isn’t as strong as devs thought at launch, something like a 30sec CD with lower durration swiftness to compensate (15 sec? 20 sec?) would be good. As it is right now it just gets stripped. Staff is also the only other form of swiftness, the problem is, a guardian who is speced offensivly cant waste 10 sec in a staff to get this swiftness, to much damage is lost. An idea here would be to move the swiftness symbol to focus thus allowing for sword/sceptar and focus play so you can do damage even when u are in ur swiftness set.

Some other random concerns:
Too many traits that are not as compact i.e. symbol has 3 traits in 1 line and 2 in another, medi has 3 traits, spirit weapons have serveral traits across many lines. These need to be more compact.

Arheundel.6451:

Your entire thread is based on team-play experiences and your solutions would clearly benefit a team, the changes you suggest would ruin the fun for many on all different formats GW2 has to offer.

Could you elaborate? Are perma stealth thives, condi burst necros, and other strong builds not annoying in solo queue or hot join? Is this an issue with these for WvW, are they not a nusance there too?

Phantaram.1265:

Stealth – This is the biggest one for me and I talked about this a long time ago in the SOTG and it’s just gotten more and more out of control. If you have two sources of long stealths in your teams line up your options at any point in the game and especially at the beginning are limitless.

There HAS to be a limit on how much stealth you can get. 6-7 seconds sounds reasonable to me but even then with two sources of stealth that is 12-14 seconds which will still give you tons of options and advantages over the other team. Stealth is a REALLY tough one to balance. As it is now people are walking around the map all leisure like for 30 seconds just talking amongst themselves like “Well I dunno who do you wanna 1 shot? We’ll 1 shot jimmy, no… bob! Well actually lets not even attack this node, onward to the enemy close point! Okay we are all here? Roger Roger. 3 2 4.. I can’t count… go! success! that other team can’t counter our amazing strat lol!”

Another solution is to give stealth some sort of counter.

I agree with this in its entirety. There needs to be some kind of heavy diminishing returns on chained stealths. Some sort of stacking reveal debuff would be good – every time you restealth within 10(?) seconds of your last stealth that stealth last 33% less, stacks until 100% so you are forced to not stealth for 10 seconds. Its a rough idea, but something that should be looked at.

Now, before every thief gets out their keyboards and start to send me death threats let me say this. The thief class needs to be moved away from stealth abusing and given alternate forms of utility and survivability. Most of the recent changes have been good, even the broken shadow trap was a good start at giving thieves more utility as they get nerfed. Stealth is hard to balance in nearly every game, and GW2 has one of the strongest stealths yet (doesn’t break on damage, is a true stealth, can’t see outline ala Sc2, instant stealth, doesn’t fade to stealth). I think changing stealth to anything I listed above (particularly a fade to stealth and non-perfect stealth so you can see someone standing next to you in it to dodge burst) would be a great start. On top of that, missing a backstab shouldn’t keep you stealthed and a heart seaker that hits SOULDN’T stealth you when using out of a smoke field… they just did damage to you kitten .

Shadow refuge is elite status good. This post is getting longer that I expected so I won’t go into a lot of details but the duration it last should be less, the CD should be longer, and it shouldn’t give nearly as long of an AoE stealth… or make it an elite (the better option IMO) to make thieves chose between utility and offense (basilisk venom).

Sorry this got a big longer than I expected so I will wrap it up with 1 last thought.

Many of this builds have counters and builds that work well at countering how they play. The problem is that these counters are not strong enough to be viable when put up against other builds. The only things I feel need to be nerfed are necromancers and stealth mechanics – other things are manageable with continued buffs to weaker builds. To list some off: offensive guardians, warriors, mantra mesmers, non-stealth thief builds, engis (make elixer C a break stun for the love of god); I could go on and on.

Sorry for the long posts. Ill add more after some more talk happens

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

As someone who has played 4 different classes in the last month trying to find one that worked with my team (eventually siding with running s/d ele)I do think after the fresh air buff that instant cast eles are strong. I would hold off on any notions of broken though. It may come across as a bit bias seeing as I do play the class but there are A LOT of hard counters that exist for it at the moment. While a full air arcane combo can instant cast for backstab-ish damage you’re not doing it from stealth and the CD on it is much higher. I personally have not been running double arcane as you have been for quite some time and we also don’t run a thief at the moment (so no gibs from stealth) so this all could be part of the reasons we have differing opinions on the matter. I think arcane wave is in a good spot and when run alone is strong, but not broken IMO. Maybe it is the fact that when you run 2 arcanes it becomes over the top? In that case wouldn’t it be better to see arcane blast repurposed a bit rather than nerfing both to not hurt builds that don’t run double arcane? Nerfing it in the way you suggest essentially means that in order to achive solid burst still you are forced to then run both where there is an option at the moment. Again, just change blast to have some more utility IMO. Some more discussion here would be nice.

Phantaram.1265:

Necromancers – I think the rest of the forums can tell you about this one.

Weakness – This condition went from not affecting critical strikes at all to absolutely destroying them. My arcane spells can hit a 1600 toughness necromancer for about 1700 average but if it glances from weakness it just went down to 360 damage. That is an absolutely drastic reduction of damage on top of reducing my endurance regeneration. It’s also entirely plausible to get 20+ seconds of weakness on you quite often from necromancers.

Necromancers and weakness go hand in hand.
It has been beaten to death on these boards so i’ll keep it short. Why were necros access to fear buffed (spectral wall), fear durations increases (thus more chance at double procing terror), given access to burning, given incentive to get 30% condi duration (due to Dur. Fire trait), AND weaknesss buffed… ALL IN THE SAME PATCH. This was obviously going to be an issue, it took one look at the patch notes to know it was going to be broken and it is…. very much so.

To give some more constructive feed back:

Spectral Wall is far too strong. For a class that is supposed to be an attrition class with weakness, chill, and cripple Spectral wall gave it FAR to much self peel. Add the insane fear damage you can take from it if positioned well (fear lock someone into a wall with breaks stun is down) and the crazy team utility it has and you get probably the biggest problem skill in the game. Two things NEED to happen to this skill. One – increase the CD, 60 seconds at least. Two there needs to be an internal CD on the fear (3 seconds seems good) so you can’t lock someone into a wall with it and zone so well.

Terror + burning – This has been discussed to death, it is over the top. Nerf D. Fire IMO but there are many ways to fix this.

Weakness – On top of making condi builds (no.. just necros) crazy strong, you also increased counters to direct damage builds. 50% damage 50% of the time is just too much. With all the condi in the meta you can’t reliably keep it cleansed even with absurd amounts of condi clear that teams are running and it leads to far to much RNG in damage. Did you skill crit? Did it glancing? Both? Neither? It’s crazy, someone is at 10% HP and a triple hit phoenix glancings and it lives. I would much rather see it put to a flat 15-25% reduction to reduce this horrible RNG along with some duration nerfs that were in the original LEAKED patch notes.

Next..

Good thread, I’ll give my feedback to the initial post before adding anything extra to the list.

Phantaram.1265:

Greatsword Mesmer – The damage is just insane, if S/D thief or Necro ever get nerfed (mesmers counters) the greatsword mesmer will just range from afar destroying people while his teammates make sure nothing gets to him.

Sword/Dagger Thief – It just dodges too much. It is often the biggest threat on the enemy team but also the last thing you wanna focus because you will end up wasting all your spells on him while he’s dodging. Alternatively you could leave the thief himself really strong but reduce his utility. Shadow Refuge is just as strong of a rez utility as any other in my opinion if not stronger and is only on a 60 second cooldown. Lyssa runes are also pretty strong, reduce boon duration to 5 seconds instead of 10? Obviously nerfing all of this is way too much. Just choose 1 or 2. It’s also kind of odd that flanking strike aoe cleaves. That dagger has quite the wide range of attack!

These two builds (along with some other) have two very important things in common: nearly permanent access to vigor and sigils of energy. This was discussed a bit in a thread about a month ago concerning perma evasion but it is worth mentioning again.

GS Shatter Mesmers are able to sit up on ledges uncontested on many maps under little pressure to dodge evasively; thus all of their dodges are able to be used for clone production for spam shatters from afar pushing their DPS over the top. Should they be put under pressure they are able to fall back on a multitude of defensive utility skills AND absurdly high endurance regeneration. There is another issue with the build in the fact that all of their damage and offensive utility (boon strips, damage increases) comes from weapons and traits so their utilities are able to be devoted wholly to team utility (portal, illusion of life) or defense (blink, portal – yes its both, decoy).

S/D Thief again is a huge abuser of sigils of energy. Withdraw gives it nearly perma vigor when traited to add into the evasion spam. The build has seen a decline in the NA scene since the nerfs last patch and I don’t think it is necessarily OP. It is however very annoying, offers little in terms of counter play (as you pointed out above) and is over all degrading to the state of the game. The one thing the old build lost (and there might be a gosu new build in EU that allows for it) is shortbow so the s/d thief lost a huge part of its standard kit. You mentioned shadow refuge, and I agree on that point but will talk about it later in this post.

While there are many ways to fix these 2 builds I feel like these changes would be the best:

Removal/Nerf to Sigils of Energy, 50% endurance on a 10 sec CD is just too good – especially when pair with perma vigor. Nerf GS mesmer range down to 900 putting it in line with other mid range weapons, there is no reason it needs to be low bow range. For thief – increase withdraws CD to 20 (25?) seconds while keeping the same heal per second. A 15 second, uninterruptable heal, that removes impairing conditions is too strong. This will also decrease access to vigor and lead to less evades. The other option would be to drop a bit of damage off of larcenous and make it share the boons it steals so it provides more utility but not as much DPS.

Next Post

There are 2 main issues with the map, both are easily fixed without dooming the entire map to hot-join only existance with Raid and Spirit Watch.

Both of these issues have been discussed frequently but they are worth mentioning again:

1 – The power of pulls/knock backs/imobilizes. On one hand this is great, it puts more emphasis on skillful CC use and allows for new builds and build variations. The problem isn’t the emphasis on CC but rather the reward. Death is far to harsh of a penalty for often a single mistake (not dodging 1 well placed KB or imob). The other issue is that this allows for heavy bunker builds to score fast kills. The longer a fight progresses the more chances a player has to land that 1 clutch CC, at that point it doesnt matter that you have been beating on him for 60 seconds and have finnaly exhausted all his CDs. I good CC ends the fight out right. It gives bunkers FAR to much power.

This issue isn’t too hard to fix (in theory, implementation would take some time). Instead of players dieing and being forced into a 2-3 second fall + death respawn. Instead add a lower level of the map with ports back to you spawn (or potentially more areas of the map?). Instead of falling to your death, having a ~20 sec death timer (in tPvP) and giving the enemy points, you would instead have to make a short run over to a port and renter the “main” map. This way good CC is still empahsised on the map and it is punished (thus leading to build variety) but the punishment fits the crime.

The seond issue is the strenght of the cannon. Khylo has made it very clear that "cannon"esque objectives need to be different in order for them to make large impacts and I think Skyhammer is a good start. However, and undodgeable, unblockable, cannon with a larger area of effect, easier targeting, faster fire rate, and more damage was NOT the answer.. lol.

Either allow it to be dodged/blocked or lower the damage (by alot). There are a lot of ways to “fix” the cannon and it’s mostly number tweaks that would require some testing.

With this being said the question that remains is:

Why even bother, what is good about Skyhammer?!

The answer: A lot of stuff…

I suppose more detail should be added to that statement.

The map promotes drastic build diversity. This is a GOOD thing. The same builds should not dominate every map. Teams should have multiple builds and multiple strats based on map and opponents team comp. Skyhammer is one of the most drastic maps from the “core 3”. The emphasis on CC, the size of the map, the ability to “neutralize” the effects of a bunker with good CC, and the power of the cannon all lead to a much more skirmish and agressive play style on the map (note agvressive != glassy per say). It’s different, and that’s good, fix the 2 big issues with the map and it will be massivly popular.

You don’t HAVE to do PvE to get these skins. You do get achievement points from PvP. You just will get them faster if you do both… just like PvErs will get them faster if THEY do PvP dailys too.

I fail to see what all the huff n puff is about, it’s just skins.

Now that the cats out of the bag might as well include:

Stuns and Dazes in the game are always rounded up to the next second.

That 1/2 Second pistol whip stun, gets rounded up to a second.

Put sigils of paralyzation on and an Engineer’s Crate turns into a 3 (2.3 rounded up) second AoE stun, Warrior’s shield bash turns into a 2 (1.15 rounded up)second stun, the list goes on for all dazes and stuns.

The inverse is also true, put on runes of melandrue and a 1 second warrior stun remains 1 second, even though it should be .75. A thiefs pistolwhip is still 1 second (.375 rounded up). BUT if the other player has a paralyzation sigil. What would be a 3 second (2.3 second rounded up) Engineer Crate goes back down to a 2 second (1.725 secon rounded up) stun.

As said before this applies to all stuns and dazes.

This needs fix, but the sigils and many stuns/dazes need some serious looking into after that seeing as it is somehting people have been building around for ages and isn’t considered OP by any means.

Don’t forget buffing weakness.

I’m not saying weakness didn’t need buffs to be useful against other classes but warrior was already in a bad spot. Any of the minor buffs done this patch were outweighed by the warrior nerfs and buffs to other aspects.

The nerf to the chop chain was ridiculously over the top. When you buff blinds and soft CC classes like necro to extremes how can you expect warriors to land 6 hits in a row over the course of 3 seconds. 25% more speed from warrior’s sprinting doesn’t allow me to keep up with targets while getting perma chilled.

Cleansing Ire is great for getting bleed/posion/burning off, but not so great for removing the conditions that were keeping warrior down in the first place. Dogged march was a good start but we knew this months ago, it needs to include weakness and possibly blind. We need to see more traits like dodged marches.

Bezerkers stance is also a good start, but without any mass condi removal there isn’t a really good way to take advantage of it. Good players just wont use huge condi CDs on you once it’s poped.. for a whole 4-5 seconds. It’s only use now is to use it to run into things like wells, marks, and traps that have been previosuly layed down. Just not a great tool. Make it remove all condi (similiar to guardians CoP) and possibly increase its durration to match Frenzys.

Lastly, warriors have a lot of semi-good tools now in the defensive tree. The problem is you can’t take nearly what you need to conter heavy condi because you only get 3 options. Cleansing Ire, Dodgged March, Defy Pain, Last Stand, and Sure-footed are all must have traits in that line.

This patch was 1 step forward and 2 steps back. On one side warriors got some nice buffs against classes and builds it already dealt with fine (boon hate trait down to 20 in Dis and the Brawn Change were very nice). But on the other the means to shut down a warrior went way up and as it stands you can’t spec to deal with hard cc (through stability), condi cc, AND still do damage. Keep going in this direction, but much more needs to be done. Some of it may go against you warrior class ideals but right now its a flawed class.

The change was needed and a step in the right direction. Blind was too easily negated before, there is no reason you should be able to auto off blinds while out of range of anything. Blinds were making little to no impace against good players.

On that note, this change has brought most blinds over the top. They are just too good now, and counter several builds/classes far harder than other. The change should 100% stay, but blind skills need to be re-evaluated. In particular ele’s blinding flash and thieves black poweder. I would say b-flash’s CD needs to be brought up and black poweder should only tick every 2 seconds or maybe a 1 second less duration.

You’re missing the point. sPvPers don’t have gold income as there is no way to change our curency (glory) into gold at any decent rate. So you are punishing the hardcore PvPers… who happen to be the ones who will most likely want to buy arenas.

On the other hand, people these shouldn’t be cheap. Not everyone is supposed to have a CA and $10 a month isn’t hard to support as a guild.

Geff.1930:

Siric.3589:

The nerf to Axe chop chain is so silly, warriors were so close to being viable.

Other than that pretty good patch. Will have to keep an eye on necros and weakness access now.

They nerfed the damage to make up for the fact that Warriors are now better able to stay on their target using the buffed Warrior’s Sprint, Swiftness on crit and Berserker Stance’s condition immunity for 4 secs.

I think it was a logical step.

Except axe warrior DPS wasn’t over the top before, could have been good this patch.. maybe a tad strong but nothing warranting putting such an excess of damage into the last hit.

Also Warrior’s Spring doesn’t stack with swiftness, something warriors could keep up for the majority of a fight due to signet of rage. It’s great when you’re stripped yes, but it’s not as huge as you make it out to be.

Trimming that much dps into the last hit was way over kill. The idea is nice, reward warriors for sticking to a target, it just was over the top is all.

The nerf to Axe chop chain is so silly, warriors were so close to being viable.

Other than that pretty good patch. Will have to keep an eye on necros and weakness access now.

Please no more particle effects in sPvP. Oh god please no.

So your logic is that because players can always use offensive skills that they should also be able to use defensive skills with little to no cd(evades/dodge). I see. Lets just put heal skills on 0 CD too so we have dynamic long team fights.

Oidmetala.8426:

HUGE WALL OF TEXT

So in all of ramble you didn’t once state why spam evading is healthy for the game or why its good to diminish the importance of a well time dodge roll by having the ablity to spam evades. All you did was call certain builds bad and talk about how much you kill them with your uber pro team. Again, just because you can kill something doesn’t mean it is balanced or healthy for the game.

Oidmetala.8426:

i dont need a intelligent input for such a stupid topic…
because its a learn to play problem you dodge qq guys have here

and maybe…
you waste only time on “intelligent discussion”
instead playing and training how to play this game

just talking guys, not playing guys here…
always the same names qq about anything
dont get it
this qq was start after release and much no need nerfs was comming for your
kittenstorm topics

Thanks for making such a well thought out counter point.

Where do people get the notion that because a build can be killed, or has limited counters, that said build is therefore balanced and/or healthy for the game? Any of the evasion spam builds (not just bunker BM ranger) hurt the game. They diminish the impact a good, well time, properly executed dodge roll should have on this game by spamming thier dime-a-dozen evades off cool down with little reguard for other players actions; and when a good player who does pay attention and not just spam get thier hands on the build the results are even more broken.

This isn’t a L2P or a class discussion. If you can explain to us how spamming dodge rolls being effective is good for the game, then by all means do. But you wont be able to, the best argument you will be able to put up will likely be something to do with class ABCD being too weak without spam evades, it doesn’t matter in the scope of this discusion. Classes can be buffed, letting unhealthy mechanics stay in the game for the sake of keeping a class from being unviable for 1-2 months is a terrible way to think about game balance.

Sol.4310:

Siric.3589:

Evasion skills don’t need to be removed. The CD’s need to be increased and the skills themselves made more impactful. A good example of a well degisned evasive skill is ele’s updraft. Its a kockback, swiftness, and evade, but on a long CD. Eles dont spam this skill to evade when endurance is low, they use it for setting up combos and for coutnering burst ect.

It shouldn’t be the case that rangers have 50% endurance regen, High Vigor upkeep, sigilis of energy, and low cd evasive skills. As it is right now evasive skills are used in the small window that you’re not dodge roll spamming. Rather than evasion skills being used in reaction to a read you get off your oppenent they are just used to fill the gaps that you cant dodge.

If you want them to change the CD and nerf everything to do with our tank, give us more damage to make up for the lose of tank.

Reason we need the heavy tanking skills is we DO NO DAMAGE…..

I dont want them to nerf everyting to do with soley RANGER tank. This whole tread has nothing to do with 1 specfic class, rather evasion spam builds in general. If any class is lacking after the balance so be it, bring it back up by other means. Play another class until then. You don’t see players in moba’s not change champion pools after major balance, why would it be different here? To not change unbalanced, poorly designed, mechanics just because a class xyz might be weak for a patch or two is absurd.

Evasion skills don’t need to be removed. The CD’s need to be increased and the skills themselves made more impactful. A good example of a well degisned evasive skill is ele’s updraft. Its a kockback, swiftness, and evade, but on a long CD. Eles dont spam this skill to evade when endurance is low, they use it for setting up combos and for coutnering burst ect.

It shouldn’t be the case that rangers have 50% endurance regen, High Vigor upkeep, sigilis of energy, and low cd evasive skills. As it is right now evasive skills are used in the small window that you’re not dodge roll spamming. Rather than evasion skills being used in reaction to a read you get off your oppenent they are just used to fill the gaps that you cant dodge.

Reread some of my post, I may have gone off on a slight vigor tangent but I stated earlier that ranger, thief, and messmer(possibly) evades need to be nerfed heavily, energy runes should be removed, and lastly vigor needs adjusted.

Let me rephrase my opinion on vigor. Vigor, in it’s current form, is too strong for how easy it is to access it on most classes. Ele’s are not the main abusers of this as thier trait atleast isn’t a freebie 5 point minor trait. Either vigor should be a much more rare boon that takes heavy investment to get or it should be nerfed a bit OR a combination of both. There are many ways to skin the vigor cat. /end vigor rant.

Vigor is an issue but I do agree it should be the last to be adjusted. Enegry sigils and evasive skills are the bigger issue.

Ele’s have good heals and other effects on dodge roll yes, but there is also internal CDs on it. The vigor on crit is enough for them to make full use of their on dodge abilities. Look at most good ele players, they either run battle or hydromancy/geomancy sigils. Some very tanky tripple cantrip players run enery sigils but it is not NEEDED to get the effectiveness out of evasive arcanum, they run energy sigils because of how broken spam dodge rolling is and they are trying to be as defenisive as possible.

Again, most top eles don’t run energy sigils and ele’s dont have abusive passive evade skills so I am failing to see how talking about nerfing abusive endurance/evasion mechanics hurts eles. If anything it is a huge buff as it will be MUCH easier to land fire combos in both S/D and D/D.

As for nerfs, nerfs are needed to avoid power creep. If you don’t understand why it is better for balance to nerf rather than buff the rest of the board then you should invest some time into reading and thinking about game balance. Vigor is an issue both in strengh and in access to it by some classes. What is worse? I would tend to think the easy access some classes have to vigor is the bigger problem, but it’s hard to tell without testing (that’s what the devs are here for…). Top end players will not just start falling over to 100b warriors because they don’t have infinate endurance you’re exagerating. What will happen is classes will need to save evades for things like 100b rather than spamming them to dodge anytime something shoots them an awkward look.

Ele really isn’t one of the problem classes. Most eles get by just fine with just the vigor on crit trait and do not excessivly stack other forms of endurance regen (such as the sigils or other traits) and do not have multiple low cd passive evade skills. Why does everyone get so defensive about thier class even when an argument is not even dirrected at it. Jeez

While it is true that classes like thief and ranger rely on evades for defense (in contrast to a warrior’s high base stats or an ele’s many heals) it does not mean that the current state of endurance refill stacking + low (or no) cd evades is balance OR even fun to play against/play (matter of opinion blah blah). It’s too strong; the ways a class can gain endurance need to be limited along and skills the passivly evade need to be put on longer CDs. Of coarse it would then be fine to buff other aspects of skills that passivly evade in order to make them more than skills that are mashed off CD when your edurance is low.

Nerf vigor (both the boon and access to it), edurance on swap mods, and passive evade skills plox.

As many people have already said, the problem is not just dodge rolls, or just vigor access, or just endurance on swap – it’s when you combine them all together that you have issues.

On one hand you can have a class like necro. No self vigor, no bonus endurance regen or return, no passive evades. Their only option to gain additional evades is edurance on swap or a team mate giving them vigor. In this case the edurance on swap mods are more or less needed for a necro to have good mitigation.

On the other hand there are classes like thieves and rangers with easy access to all of the things listed above. Combine bonus endurace regen, almost perma vigor, passive exaved (no CD on thief), and endruance on swap mods and you get a huge mess.

In general the endurance on swap mods are bad for the game. They are just too strong. While some classes are reliant on them it would be much better to remove them from the game and buff the classes that then need buffs. This would stop some of the absurd evasion stacking that we see.

Removing a massive cross class endurance steroid would allow for a much better class by class balance of evasion and keep people from stacking evasion buffs on top of evasion buffs on top of evasion buffs. Each class can then be much better tuned. After that the next step would be to look into traits, there are many that are just too easy to get (5-10 points) for a massive vigor or endurance buff.

Forefire cont.

Most of the suggested improvements here have been simply to change the point value the lord brings or to add more defense around the lord to make rushes easier to defend but these changed do not fix the root of the issue with the objective, the fact that the objective has 0 impact on the game until a team hits 350. Instead what I would like to see is even more of a Gw1 style with some more NPCs scattered throughout the base, each giving a small amount of points (10-15?) and being fairly easy to kill solo. NPCs in the lord pit would also give points and the lord would be dropped down to 75? 100?. Lord rushes can still happen in close games then, but it also opens up the door to having a mobile player pressure a teams base during the game thus leading to interesting decisions. If you ignore someone killing your outter or lord pit NPCs it puts pressure on your team to either send someone to respond, split to their base, or to crush a team fight much MUCH closer to the decisions players had to make when playing against a split team in Gw1 GvG. Things such as VoD or a buff for killing the lord could also be implemented with or without this change to add more depth.

Khylo:
Khylo’s secondary is a strong one that can have a huge impact on the game but is very hit or miss… literally. The treb is very clunky which leads to many ineffective uses of it, however when it does land at a crucial moment the implications are huge. All in all I think again the map suffers much more from bad layout than the secondary but this does not mean that the treb couldn’t use some tweaking to make it more impactful while not making it mandatory to use yourself.

TL;DR
Secondary Objectives need to put importance on the map AWAY from capture points to help spread out the map and make match ups more tactical. Forest and Khylo’s problems have more to do with map and objective layout then they do the mechanics of the objective. Foefire’s objective needs to have an impact throughout the whole match and not just after a team hits 350.

The current secondary objectives on the 3 “main” maps could use some serious tweaking. While secondary objects are supposed to be that, secondary, they current ones offer very little in terms of tactical depth during the match.

When an objective does not pose a more or less constant concern the game gets boiled down very quickly to a rather simple 3 point equation. It is often pretty easy from that point to predict the opposing teams moves based upon res timers ect.

Ex. If you are in the process of wiping them in a mid fight and they are in control of their point, they will more often than not going to send something (depending on what resses) to push your home point in hopes of getting a neutralize or cap to negate your teams point gain from the mid cap. There are of coarse many factors that could sway this, but in most cases it is the correct move to send something with good escapes to attempt a neut. The only other reasonable option available is to not push anything, group up and defend the losing team home point, and make another group push mid.

That’s one example, there are many more due to the simplicity of only having to worry about 3 objectives with 5 people most of the time. Now, in the heat of the moment, while you are in the middle of a team fight, worrying about 100 other things, thinking this far ahead is not always easy and that is where mistakes are made, however as players improve you see this happen less and less. Most matches at the current top level are decided much more on who can win more fights and are not all that tactically “deep”. Compare this to League where there are whole team strategizes based around not team fighting or winning straight up fights and instead split pushing objectives or poking ect.

The secondary objects should be where they extra level of complexity is and right now they are quite weak with the exception of Temple.

Forest:
Neutral monsters are a concept that has worked for many games as an objective and there is no reason they shouldn’t work here as well. However, due to the small, very compact, size of the map. Positioning of monsters right next to capture points, and small points gain/buff they give these monsters often have little impact on the outcome of a game (there are some exceptions). Bosses are often taken in response to losing or winning a fight. Did your team just lose a fight on their point? Group up, secure your capture point, take the boss, push mid. It’s a very straightforward line of thinking.
There are several ways these bosses could be improved upon. Making them easier to kill (less HP) while keeping their benefits the same could promote a solo player killing bosses quickly while your team stalls. Making the map larger and positioning the bosses further from home nodes makes it harder for a team to protect their boss and home node at the same time (something that is very easy to do now). Adding a 3rd boss to the mix away from cap points would help to spread the map out more, but where would you put it? In the middle closer to the beach, that will often be much more favorable to the losing team as they will be spawning close to it with full HP. All in all Forest falls short much more due to the map layout than the secondary but that discussion is for another thread.

Foefire:
The lord allows for some very epic come back victory’s for sure, but it only becomes a factor when a team nears 350 points (or is in such a demanding lead that the lord kill only helps to speed up a win). Until a team nears 350 it is disadvantageous to send 1,2, or more people into the enemy’s team base (killing the door is a different story). You lose too much presence on the map to split someone off into the base early and it will lead to lost team fights and capture points, meanwhile the person in the base more often than not cannot manage to kill the lord in the meantime. It is far more effective to keep all 5 players worried about team fights and capture points to continue your strangle hold on the map and then to lord rush at 350 as it is near impossible the defend when executed correctly.

Boo is awful, she is really bad at casting.

Pack Runes #5 Bonus: All nearby allies move 5% faster (does not stack)
or 2% Damage for each boon on you

Hoelbrak #6 Bonus- 33% Condi Reduction

Nightmare #6 Bonus – 2 sec fear or 45 Sec CD

Runes of Speed #6 Bonus – 15% Movespeed

Soldier Runes – REMOVE, add functionality to shout traits to compensate (does not have to be the same). These runes limit shout builds as you more or less have to take them, but Vit is not always the main stat you are wanting. No other skill type has a special rune set, where are the Signet Runes.

milo.6942:

Siric.3589:

Invuns need to make you drop the orb.

No.

The orb is something that should be extemely difficult to cap. It should require proper coordination and match awareness to know when to grab it and try to cap.

The orb should NOT be something you grab on a tank with multiple invuns and slowly walk back because the enemy teams has option A: focus the TANK with INVUNS to slow him so he doesn’t get a free cap; or B: kill the multiple people peeling for them while they get a free 30 points.

Invuns need to make you drop the orb.