Guild Wars 2

That would be true if some of the better bunker builds didn’t also have like 20 ways to remove a condition.

I mean have you ever tried to kill a bunker elementalist with conditions…good luck with that.

Shortbow is your friend.

Did you really have to post this?

Now it’s going to be like when Golem-in-a-box was popularized the week before it was banned, and EVERYONE started to spam them.

…except it will be with gears instead >.>

Looking forward to a few terrible weeks of WvW coming up :/

I wouldn’t mind if all items that were previously banned from WvW were unbanned, but instead there’s a 60 sec cooldown between the usages of any item.

That imo would be fair and would actually open up some strategy. There might be a few exceptions that have to be adjusted, but for the most part I can’t think of anything that would be outrageously broken with a universal 60 second cooldown between any item usage.

Relentliss.2170:

That is the damage that 1 stack of confusion does.

Like hell it does.

2k condition damage doesn’t even break 500 per stack.

If you are getting hit for 6k with confusion you have 12 stacks of confusion from a 2k condition mesmer.

If you ever have 12 stacks of confusion on you, you are doing something very wrong and that Mesmer is burning every cooldown that he has on you.

(Not to mention how…impractical it is to have 2k condition damage)

Torch + Signet of Midnight is ridiculously silly when blind causes confusion.

The only 3 weapons that currently exist that I could realistically seeing us get that would fit the theme of Mesmer are Dagger, Pistol, and Rifle.

While rifle traditionally isn’t something you would see on a scholar class, Mesmer at the same time isn’t exactly normal. I mean we do have a greatsword and it’s effective at long range.

I think if they make a rifle for Mesmer and “invert” it where it’s a close range weapon, it would thematically fit.

selan.8354:

selan.8354:

if u have gotten 5000 dmg then it was a crit and u must have run into th nullfield that was placed together with th bubble.

I ment crit from the other player, he basically hit himself crit.

You have no idea how confusion works, do you.

Relentliss.2170:

Its a totally BS skill. Its essentially a DOT that ticks when you use an ability. Everyone has to use abilities or die. A dot that ticks for 1k+ is kittenly OP in any game. Its also kittenly easy to apply for the damage it does.

I know, right, DoTs ticking for 1k are so broken.

Killshot’s damage is slaughtered…

Thieves Steal + CnD + Backstab is only a shadow…

No, not even Warrior’s quickened 100 Blades can cut it…

compared to 1k damage per second!!!

Oozo.7856:

Saturn.6591:

Edit: I play WvW and I also sometimes jump into PvP. I don’t remember that I ever died while having confusion on me.

So, you’ve never been hit with a stack of confusion at low health where even trying to heal yourself kills you? You don’t PvP much I take it. :P

You are at 2K health, just don’t do anything for 5 seconds!

You would have been flat out dead if he just decided to Mind Wrack you instead :/

I mean he hit you with an attack when you were at 2k health and didn’t kill you.
You should almost be thanking him for a chance to cleanse, heal, and fight back…

Oozo.7856:

IMO, condition damage is supposed to be sustained damage, not burst damage

Except the design of confusion implies that it’s the opposite.

Retaliation is supposed to be about sustained damage. Stacking adds duration. Most sources last at least 5 seconds if not longer (Save Yourself is 10). Not very difficult for certain classes to run with near permanent retaliation.

Confusion is pretty much all about burst damage. Stacking adds intensity. Most sources only last for 3 seconds with only a handful lasting for 5 (most which belong to engineer). Very difficult (if playing a competent opponent) to apply more then just a handful of stacks (Cry of Frustration being the only spell that gives more then 3 that isn’t as easy to dodge ).

Things can only be balanced when compared to something else and you’d have to be insane to say that confusion builds are dominant and ruining WvW atm. There are much bigger problems with WvW then a build that specializes at beating your support guardian in a 1v1 fight.

but…but…but…the quaggan tonics!

Azunai.1065:

eh, not sure if i remember right, but aint they like bolders?
stuff that lies around so you can throw it, but its impossible to actualy
“pick them up” into your inventory?

A vendor probably sells them.

Oozo.7856:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Oozo.7856:

I guess the sPvP and tPvP people were not able to L2P so confusion got nerfed there.

Again, confusion was buffed for PvE, and WvW as a side. sPvP is the original state of confusion.

Your argument needs a buff.

It doesn’t make a difference to the argument. Why should 1v1s in WvW be easier for a confusion mesmer than 1v1s in sPvP?

Your brain needs a buff.

Hey, let’s change armor to be like sPvP too where you can’t get +1000% crit damage. Why should 1v1s in WvW be easier for a glass cannons than 1v1s in sPvP.

I mean really? sPvP =/= WvW.

Thieves are rather underwhelming in sPvP while being stupidly awesome in WvW.
Warriors are rather underwhelming in sPvP while Killshot is stupidly awesome in WvW.
D/D Elementalists are stupidly awesome in WvW while being…stupidly awesome in WvW…

In sPvP 1v1s actually matter. In WvW your little 1v1 is probably largely irrelevant to the greater ZergvZerg fight and confusion is hardly broken in Zerg fights in comparison to other spells such Wall of Reflection.

That being said, I agree that confusion activating on skills from a dodge roll is pretty lame and should be fixed.

It’s like people are making it out to be that a mesmer can permanently keep 8 stacks of confusion and the moment it’s removed it’s instantly reapplied?

Mesmer only has 2 spells that give a significant amount of confusion.

Cry of Frustration that gives 8 stacks for 3 secs on a 30 second recast.
Confusing Images that gives 5 stacks for 5 secs on a 15 sec recast.

One requires a 3 clone shatter + Illusionary Persona meaning if you are mindlessly trying to melee the mesmer when he has 3 clones up with out condition removal, it’s your own fault.

The other has a very obvious 1 second activation time and then gradually applies them over 2 seconds that can almost entirely be negated by a dodge roll.

With even 1 condition removal spell and proper dodging you should be able to avoid getting hit with large stacks of confusion.

It’s like complaining about being stunned when your stun breakers are down. It’s your own fault for either having it on CD or not setting one to your bar for the situation at hand.

It’s like the staff clones attacks don’t inflict burning, don’t bounce, and use Sharper images themselves…

3 staff clones over time will do more condition damage then any other illusion (triple warden might be an exception, and trident clones don’t count).

What other illusions (especially phantasms) are better for is “spike” condition damage. A iDuelist for example can inflict up to 8 stacks of bleed immediately when summoned, but then must wait for his next attack to apply any more bleeds.

Also if you are really running a staff with a glass cannon build with the intent of doing a ton of damage with 3 warlocks you are doing something very wrong. Greatsword or even Sword/Scepter + Pistol would do much better then a staff.

Now there are a few reasons to use the staff with a more power based build, but most of those uses are PvP situations.

Summoning 3 warlocks on a boss used to be good until Anet hammered his attack speed into oblivion. Now there are much better options and unless there’s a reason you need both the GS and the staff to kite something around the room, or you need an extra ethereal field I just can’t see a lot of need to use the staff in PvE content considering the GS largely outclasses it with Power armor.

Except we did crush you.

On reset we held your garrison until we went to bed.

The only building you held in eternals at one point was SM.

You were pushed to ~100 PPT.

You got crushed.

I don’t think anyone from Maguuma had any delusions about the odds of this match-up. We know that population coverage wins games and Maguuma’s night coverage is non-existant.

That being said, you can either continue to chest thump that you managed to PvDoor your way to another victory, or you can start asking yourself why you got stomped as badly as you did.

Either way, it won’t be long until you come across a server with similar coverage to you who are able to perform as well if not better then our opening this week.

Except they won’t “go to bed.” They will just hold everything they took and upgrade it and start to gradually push you off the map until you are getting spawn camped 24/7.

Population by a Looooooooooooong shot.

I mean on Friday I heard that during oceanic primetime that Kaineng had a quene on every map.

DB’s asian crew is good (relatively), but they never had THAT many people.

It’s not any different from any other unload type skill.

If they start it before you cloak, you’ll get hit by the entire skill.

That being said…they die in like one hit. the only reason that he can summon multiples of them and have them all chase you is if you aren’t killing them.

If he’s already started shooting before you turned invisible then even if you turn invisible the shots will continue to hit you. You have to turn invisible before the phantasm begins the skill at all and considering that he’ll start 1/4th of a second after being summoned…good luck with that.

hyyangoz.6195:

Mag BL taken GG

Posting a screenshot after you PvDoored the entire zone…

Keeping it classy I see.

IBountyHunterI.4601:

There’s so many of you my 1500$ laptop goes from 60-120fps roaming to 40 in normal set fights and down to 20 once you’ve all shown up. A sinful amount of players lol

That’s Culleng for ya

DivineBeing.2086:

And so the Kaineng legacy continues. That’s the scores I was waiting to see!

The PvDoor legacy continues!

All hail the Kaineng!!!

Saying that Phantasmal Warlock changes the Staff from a condition weapon to a hybrid weapon is about as silly as saying that the trident is a hybrid weapon because Spinning Revenge gives retaliation…

By that definition there are virtually no condition weapons in the game since most weapons have a physical component to them like Ranger Shortbow for example.

Ironvos.9014:

Seems like this is an gonna be an interesting week.
I think we are in the right tier now and are meeting our match in GH and Millers.
Could still go either way, but GH is very strong in the morning as we expected, but it’s not as horrible as we might have feared the last weeks
Let’s enjoy it while it lasts, its very likely we will all be meeting some T3-T1 servers next week and get spanked :P

Not sure if you were trying to post that here or if you were just insulting us saying that we aren’t T3 servers.

Ehh, while some good match-ups will certainly get mixed up one thing it will do is rocket some of the recently deserted servers to the bottom so it doesn’t take them half a year to get down there.

At least it will quickly prevent any 1v1v0 match-ups for the most part.

Anatolian Turk.4057:

Even though in the beginning of the reset we witnessed mag and db ganging up on kain, but we never gave up and we will never give up. heres the latest score

The jig is up!

Kaineng has discovered our secret Maguuma and Dragonbrand secret alliance!

I mean why else would they secretly get double teamed in their own borderlands…

MattMesa.8401:

Regardless, I am always against nerfing – I tend to follow the novel train of thought that if a class is ‘op’ then bring everyone else up! It’s a video game, weakening people isn’t fun.

Yes, but if every class could teleport to a target from 1,200 range from invisibility, drop a relatively inescapable 15,000 in 2 seconds (primarily referring to the fact that you can’t “outmaneuver” a thieves melee attacks like you can most other melee attacks), and then stealth away and/or stealth stomp if not just teleport away the game might as well be called Call of Duty: Guild Warfare 2.

While ideally a buff is better then a nerf because of the perception in reality they are essentially the exact same thing. A buff to one class is an indirect nerf to every other class while a nerf to one class is an indirect buff to every other class.

What should never be done is to “nerf” the number of valid options available to a player. Sometimes “nerfing” one option can actually increase the number of valid options available. The issue is more often then not when ANet is nerfing things they are actually decreasing the number of valid options.

That being said, I do think there does need to be some way to “dodge” Heartseeker without having to roll just like nearly every other melee ability. Leap finishers are supposed to be gap closers so that you can get up close to your opponent then use your melee skills on the opponent. Not a spammable inescapable homing high damage attack itself! It’s be like if Bull Rush itself did as much damage as 100 Blades (slight exaggeration, but you should get the idea).

I mean part of why melee attacks do more then range attacks is because of their “escapability” since they can only hit at something like range 100. Ranged attacks hit because of their ability to hit farther back. The issue is because oh how movement speed and swiftness can essentially increase the “range” of this attack is closer to 600 then the listed 450.

The damage that Heartseeker does for a range 600 attack is absurd. Sure, the thief is squishy and ends up in the opponents face, but that hardly enough to justify it. That’s like saying a Ranger can spam a melee damage attack from 1,200, but the only down side is that the Ranger is teleported to the foe where he can continue using his melee damage ranged attack. Yeah, good luck running away from that terror.

I just think it isn’t too unreasonable to be able to dodge a spammable 600 range high damage attack by outmaneuvering my opponent as opposed to the heat seeking missile it currently is.

Freelancer.4526:

Had a good time tonight, especially when AoN poked around.

Shame there isn’t more quality guilds on Maguuma/Dragonbrand, or at least none that we’ve seen yet. Matchup has been pretty bland in our BL.

Here’s to tomorrow!

I know, right, the match up is so bland when you can’t just zerg something and karma train the zone.

Must be so boring when the entire map isn’t your color.

It’s all the stupid skill-less guilds that are swimming in bags from your corpses, right?

Only noobs hold your garrison for 8 hours straight!

Testing whether you can break a 6 second duration with Cry of Frustration.

If you can then…no idea what the issue is.

If you can’t then it’s likely that there’s a condition duration cap in place.

Do you mind testing this with Cry of Frustration.

If you can’t break a 6 second duration (5 secs on the icon) then the issue is that you can’t increase a conditions duration past +100%, and not that confusion is arbitrarily capped at 10 secs (though for all intents and purposes it currently would be since there isn’t any form of confusion that a player can inflict that has a base duration of more then 5 seconds).

Keep in mind that “9 secs” on the mob could actually be 10 seconds flat.

I’m wondering if condition duration might cap at +100%, and that’s the issue you are seeing.

spinagus.6728:

I have 2 each of the follow superior runes.. Mad King, Lyssa, and Lich

They should give me and additional 24% condition duration. They do not

Vyko.6953:

Same issue with Superior rune of Lyssa. It may give +10% condition duration but it doesnt do nothing. In my stats Im reading 0% condition duration. and when I tested bleed which lasts 10% in base, It wasnt boosted too. Please fix this, its important in balance!

The condition duration from Mad King and Lyssa (not sure about Lich) do not show up in the attributes window, but I just tested and can confirm 100% that both Mad King and Lyssa give you condition duration.

I tested the Charr racial “Shrapnel Mine”.

Its default bleeding duration is 20 seconds.

With Superior Rune of the Mad King the skill’s bleeding duration increased to 22 seconds.

With Superior Rune of Lyssa the skill’s bleeding duration increased to 22 seconds.

With both Superior Rune of the Mad King and Superior Rune of Lyssa the skill’s bleeding duration increased to 24 seconds.

Your issue is either a skill specific issue where the skill you tested isn’t receiving the extra condition duration or you simply tested it incorrectly.

Haldunius.7864:

Why doesn’t anyone seem to address the fact that many other classes have skills that defend against projectiles but only Ele’s skill works against siege? Doesn’t that seem a bit odd?

It’s not the only skill, but it’s the only skill that covers that large of an area.

Thieves Smokescreen can on a 30 second recast.
Guardian’s Sanctuary can on a 120 second recast.

Both of those have to be dropped exactly where the shot hits which can be tricky considering both of those skills are about as small as the treb shot itself.

Bay is the easiest.

Hills is by far the hardest.
If Hills is upgraded and manned by competent people it’s frankly impossible to take.

Gather my team and brainstorm the best way to turn WvW into a more strategic and skilled game instead of the numbers > all zergfest that it currently is.

Probably start by removing the AoE cap limit and instead introduce WvW specific utility spells that can protect an area from AoE for a limited amount of time to prevent it from becoming who can spam the most AoE on the choke point.

Yeah, this attack is incredibly unfair.

I don’t see how people with 0 agony resistance on level 10 are supposed to survive this unless they are a AH shout staff guardian keeping everything on cooldown from just the undodgable agony attack alone.

You have to keep in mind that most people aren’t going to be able to even get any agony resistance until they have ran path 10 a handful of times.

10 should be where they learn about agony attacks and how to dodge them. Not where they get beat senseless by an undodgable red circle.

I mean you can’t even delegate your lowest agony resistance person to lava duty as he’ll get hammered by the agony spam just as much as everyone else.

The majority of players with 0 agony resistance trying to farm tokens to progress past 10 are simply going to die to this undodgable agony attack unless they are one of those rare builds that can reach full HP every other attack.

Merendel.7128:

Honestly I’m fine with towers being able to siege keeps and keeps able to fire back. The only issue I have is keeps fireing on other keeps where no retaliation is possible. Garison to bay is one example. Garrison cant hit hills but there is this tiny window where it can hit bay which is very difficult to countersiege. Only way to stop it is to either take garison or to very slowly wittle it away from below while abuseing the odd LOS rules of the balista 2 shot and sometimes arrow carts.

This so much.

Just taking a little off that cliff at Garrison so it can’t treb Bay would be a nice improvement.

That and adding a way for the SE tower to treb Hills…somehow.

Though I haven’t tested it myself, I’ve heard that the Giver Weapons do not give Condition Duration either.

After the 1/28/13 patch the Giver Armor and the Snowflake Trinkets and their Upgrade components are still not granting any Boon duration.

Boon duration is being added to Attributes window under the Equipment tab in the Hero menu from pieces of the Giver Armor and the Snowflake Trinkets and their Upgrades, but none the boons you apply to other players or yourself receive any extra added duration from those pieces.

I hope one day we can use tridents on the ground as well.

Opponents will be confused at what is happening.

People would learn real fast how to distinguish the clones from the real Mesmer.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rare_Veggie_Pizza

There’s a good chance that guesting will “fix” that.

Just set one of your guest servers to be a near max population server.

You want an AoE cone that can attack through walls to be range 1,200…

Something would have to give, and I’d prefer the current staff auto, to a staff auto that has to sacrifice something to get 1,200

Ehh, at this point, while originally meant for NPCs, it’s now just become Panzer spamming Efut. Might as well include players since no one else is really posting anymore.

killcannon.2576:

Supersun.4603:

DevilLordLaser.8619:

There’s a well-known quote from Valve I’m going to butcher here to help describe my views on this issue.

Ahem: “Players are great at finding problems. If your players are telling you that there’s a problem, you want to look into it. Players are terrible at coming up with solutions for the problems they find, and most anything they propose should generally be ignored.”

^This

Only thing I would add is that while players in general are great at finding relevant problems that exist the majority of players are also absolutely terrible at fully understanding and describing those problems.

Thief, Warrior, and DD Ele are OP.
Portal is broken.
Zerging is too good.

If 99% of forum posters actually bothered to spend 5 minutes to research and think about the subject instead of ‘Oh hey, I didn’t bother to read the thread but this is what I think’ that completely flood out the 1% of forum posters that actually post intelligently the game would probably be in a lot better state then it currently is.

We, the other 99%, are to assume you are the 1 % then?

Yes, because I obviously pulled those statistics right out of a scientific journal about the statistical breakdown of forum goers that say stupid kitten, and given that you quoted my post and responded to it in a manor that was on-topic, by definition, that includes you in the “1%” mentioned above.

It’s not condescending. It’s just Sturgeon’s Law.

90% of everything is crap, and just like everything else 90% at minimum of the posts on these forums don’t really add that much to the discussion because of the lack of though put into people’s position.

killcannon.2576:

My opinions are more valuable than ones that are silent. If a view is not expressed or iterated in some form, it is not a view or opinion. If you want to be heard you need to speak.

Not necessarily. Someone only tends to voice their opinion when there is something “wrong.” Someone who is perfectly fine with the way things are, or at least in regard to a specific topic, tend to stay quiet.

For example I think it would be safe to say that the majority of players prefer the BLTC compared to a more primitive form of trading between players such as shouting offers over chat and having to trade items manually.

The majority of players aren’t going to be making posts saying how awful having to spam chat to make trades is and that the auction house system they are using is so much better. One person for whatever reason might like the more primitive system better and make a post on the forums about how the current system sucks compared to shout trades. Is that person’s post and opinion really more important then the “silent majorities?”

That said, there certainly are issues on the forums that while not vocalized by the entire population probably represent the views of the majority.

The biggest issue in a sense is the difficulty of knowing how much the actual player base cares about a particular forum complaint.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

There’s a well-known quote from Valve I’m going to butcher here to help describe my views on this issue.

Ahem: “Players are great at finding problems. If your players are telling you that there’s a problem, you want to look into it. Players are terrible at coming up with solutions for the problems they find, and most anything they propose should generally be ignored.”

^This

Only thing I would add is that while players in general are great at finding relevant problems that exist the majority of players are also absolutely terrible at fully understanding and describing those problems.

Thief, Warrior, and DD Ele are OP.
Portal is broken.
Zerging is too good.

If 99% of forum posters actually bothered to spend 5 minutes to research and think about the subject instead of ‘Oh hey, I didn’t bother to read the thread but this is what I think’ that completely flood out the 1% of forum posters that actually post intelligently the game would probably be in a lot better state then it currently is.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Supersun.4603:

Not necessarily

As long as there is imperfect information and that the game is designed so that there isn’t a dominant strategy, but a variety of strategies with their strengths and weaknesses then you could still have a successful game with surprises.

You are describing “perfect imbalance” that is in the video.

Sorta

The issue with chess isn’t that it is symmetrically balanced like the video claimed. It’s that it’s symmetrically balanced with perfect information.

When both players have every piece of information at any given time then it becomes possible though a lot of trial and error or mathematical calculations to determine more ideal strategies over others, and since you can always see every piece of your opponents you can see and react to whatever counter strategy he may try to employ with your own counter strategy that could have very well been planned out ahead of time.

Symmetrically balanced games with perfect information can always be solved.

If Chess no longer had its perfect information for example if we added a “Fog of War” to Chess where you could only see enemy pieces if they were directly next to one of your pieces then this would radically change the game so that it would be impossible for your opponent to know your strategy and impossible for you to know your opponent’s counter strategy (ignore any gamebreaking implications, this is just an example).

Now that still doesn’t stop a game from having a dominant strategy like their example in starcraft where it turned into a fast-paced action game. Just because that Terran, Zerg, and Protoss are perfectly balanced against each other doesn’t mean a whole lot if the options within each race are atrociously balanced. If there’s only one viable build and way to play Terran and only one viable build and way to play Zerg the then obviously most of the strategy is drained out of the game since as long as you have half decent scouting you should know exactly what the opponent is planning to do.

That’s the real issue with Guild Wars 2 class balance at the moment. It doesn’t matter how well all the classes are balanced against each other when there are some classes that within the class just have flat out dominant builds (like Shatter Mesmer vs everything else in PvP).

Not necessarily

As long as there is imperfect information and that the game is designed so that there isn’t a dominant strategy, but a variety of strategies with their strengths and weaknesses then you could still have a successful game with surprises.

Think of an online shooter where every avatar is essentially identical (like the older Halos). The map is for the most part symmetrical, but the design of the map itself offers a choice where you can go for a stronger weapon, but put yourself in a positional disadvantage or instead go for an area with a positional advantage, but are forced to use your default weapons.

As long the options are relatively balanced and there isn’t a flat out dominant strategy and you don’t know what the other team is going to do then the design of the map itself will create situations where players are forced to face each other with fair imbalances.

Now, yes, it would be a terrible idea for an MMO to have symmetrically based characters since you can’t really have character development with a bunch of the exact same avatars running around. Character development sorta goes hand in hand with assymetrical balance.

“Perfect Imbalance” is a terrible definition to what they are describing. What they are talking about is “Asymmetrical Balance.”

Likewise whether a game is based around Symmetrical Balance or Asymmetrical Balance by themselves do not lead to boring and generic or exciting and unique game play.

Chess is symmetrically balanced (well mostly), yet saying that it has boring and generic gameplay would be an insult to every chess grandmaster out there.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is asymmetrically balanced, yet to say that the game has exciting and unique gameplay that people must pay to watch high level tournament play is a bit excessive.