Guild Wars 2

EU: 3 Elementalist, a Ranger and a Thief.
NA: Balanced Comp.

I think there is a flaw in that you can kind-of vote to make sure one side has no chance, not to mention the larger population will have more of an impact. Its like US politics where the entire country chooses candidates for their party, including members from the opposing government party. Makes no sense, people with NA accounts should vote for NA people and EU people should vote for EU.

It also depends on what class you play, for example any tank class can carry a team. Many times the DPS will make the difference on two decent teams, but if you are playing during off peak hours prepare to plummet if you don’t play a carrying class (Bunker gerd, spirit ranger, any warrior [probably even 0/0/0/0/0 jk], possibly extended to engineer on far point assault or bomb nade).

Power Creep is pretty much what is sounds like… power continually creeps up until everything starts becoming too powerful. A good example of this would be the initial buffing of conditions through dhuumfire, and other condition related items to make them viable. Then instead of reverting the changes when it becomes too powerful instead of nerfing it to a lower level to get the gradual balance, the counter (condition removal, condi immunity) gets raised. This continues to happen until the problem is identified or everything is a battle of the one hits. There can also be power creep in defensive areas as well.

<— Extra Credits Power Creep

Jax.5261:

• Give an option to make all enemy character models human (so on there own screen they have whatever animation miniaturization they wish while on yours they can be seen) <— this is the obvious choice

Only do this, People should be allowed to play the character they want to play so they can feel some kind of connection to their character (I don’t feel such a connection, but many people have this need). This fixes everything by normalizing enemy characters, minimizing the amount of different animations a new player has to learn, and will make the game much easier to view from an observer perspective. Also add in a drop down with the similar options as team colors “enemy team, all, everyone but me, none”.

Now if only Spectator mode would have a way to see the difference of red team aoe’s from blue teams AoE’s people might have a better idea on what is going on in a teamfight.

I’d rather a drop down menu to with selection (similar to team colors in sPvP) that make everyone appear as human etc on the enemy team, everyone, or no one. This way you can still play what you want. The enemy players see what they want, and it lowers the overall barrier to learning 5x the animations on a single ability per class.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

Justin ODell.9517:

3) I’ve pitched the idea internally of having two MMRs, one account bound and the other per profession. Does any one have an opinion on this?

I would say just one MMR per character is enough. The skill at which one person plays a class does not transfer over to another character, this would have to be done when you are no longer allowed to swap classes after queuing due to queuing on a low ranked class then griefing with a different one.

However I have always been partial to a dual numerical system, glicko rating (impervious to point delay but retains the volitility) and a second one which would sort pf be your rating. if your “second” rating is much lower than your opponents glicko rating and you win, you get a lot more points, if you lose you don’t lose out on much. The same thing if you have a low glicko rating but somehow managed to gain a tonne of rating points you will be paired against people based on mmr so if you lose you plummet fast, and if you win you get next to nothing. Just my thoughts though.

Capes always end up looking horrible due to clipping and other issues, matching grass blowing etc. There is too much to put into them to make them operate adequately. I would rather instead of a cape, have really unique/special gear unique to high ranked players/tournament winners that are given out at the end of each season. I think this would overall achieve what “capes” do without having the other issues associated with capes.

As far as guilds go, sorry my friend I need all 5 for my randomly acquired funny named guilds.

Bombsaway.7198:

I understand why they are changing spirits.
What I wish they would do to buff them just a little is to allow the active ability to provide a short 3-4 second combo field.

Blind from SUN spirit = light
Call Lightening from STORM spirit = lightening
Cold Snap from FROST spirit = ice
Stone doesn’t really have a logical mate like a few of our traps but also isn’t getting changed.

No, rangers already have a fairly decent amount of combo fields. Spirits are not meant to do everything. They are team support with the added bonus of having an active ability.

ironjoohyun.6980:

Is there a YouTube channel like Husky Starcraft for Guild Wars 2?

I want to get more competitive and better at PvP and would like to watch a person do commentary over PvP and WvW and occasional PvE, but my interest on PvP

Thank you in advance ^,^

Not really anything like that, but there is a guild dedicated to it (listed somewhere in the sPvP forums). Most streamers will answer questions related to PvP to try and grow the scene a little bit more. Asking anything in the mists is troll bait and I would most likely avoid it

There are a few build guides done by into the mists and e-sports gaming, but I do not know how up to date those will be. I think the best idea though is to get a mentor that plays the same class as you that can show you the little tricks they have learned over time.

Josh Davis.6015:

tichorum.2415:

HOTJOIN is getting gold? Lol this will be good.

I’m not at the office so I can’t look it up, but if I remember correctly, you get more gold for LOSING Team Arena than you’d get for WINNING a CA/hotjoin match.

I wonder how long it will be before people start afk wall running in hotjoin for money. or botting “queue” solo for teamq’s as that will be better money than winning hotjoin.

Ant.3415:

Chicago Jack.5647:

I’m looking forward to this. Finishers will actually have meaning now. A lot of PvE’ers complain that PvE skins are too easy to get, and so it devalues the skins – they are right. The same can be said for finishers. Not everyone got a gold trim cape in Guild Wars 1. If you saw someone who had it, there was a tremendous amount of respect in the pvp community for those who did.

Finishers have meaning NOW and are difficult to get because the latter ones require exponentially increasing amounts of time in PVP (as opposed to buying them via gems or with gold). It doesn’t reflect on skill, just time and effort but having rewards reflect on skill in a team based, occasionally puggable environment is extremely difficult to do well and I would argue not worth it.

There are ways to make it simple to do, I would rather reward 90% of people for their ability to play a game than just give the prize to whoever can smash their head against a brick wall the longest. That is a PvE philosophy, PvP reward systems should differentiate you from other players based on where you fall in the rankings (even if there are kinks to work out with it). PvP has winners and losers, you cannot give everyone the same prize as it defeats the purpose of winning.

I had a few too many so instead I shall provide a link to the gallery

http://postimg.org/gallery/9tx6wvoi/382aa4fa/

From right to left, then down (changes characters every second screenshot)
Guardian – Big Twerp
Necro – Aemasa
Ranger – Taym
Thief – Lightless Twerp
Engineer – Echo Kaboom
Mesmer – Mixed Signals

Damsel Delilah.9084:

Soyboy.3548:

I wish they’d get rid of this “esport” mentality. MOST people who play this game don’t give a crap about the leaderboards and rarely if ever look at them (if they ever have).

Are you saying that those finishers are reserved for people who have achieved a certain rank in the leaderboards? Because that’s kittened up. I want a dragon/phoenix finisher too, but there’s no way I’m going to quit my job and practice pvp like a pro would.

I’m sorry, but this feels like a PvE mentality. PvP needs things that say ‘hey look at me, i’m awesome at this game.’ what is the point of being competitive if you get nothing to separate you and the rest of the players.

I like you, lets be friends. You will lose a bunch of the community if you cannot dangle some kind of carrot in front of people’s faces. These are the majority of the players that have quit because there was no end goal to work towards. I think rewarding players with unique items based on their percentile rank is an amazing way to do it. I am actually looking forward to player retention in PvP possibly increasing due to the changes more-so than what the changes will bring me in rewards. The largest problem right now at the higher tier is the same team matchups… over… and over… and over…

Qaelyn.7612:

Someone just said this to me in a solo queue match. He’s not wrong to have told his team that, from what I can tell given my limited experience, and it struck me as a somewhat funny indictment on the reward/incentive system in PvP right now.

I hope plans for new maps and map mechanics are in the works somewhere.

I think you misinterpreted what the guy meant. Fighting in the middle of nowhere accomplishes nothing and makes you lose. Fight over a point, you will help your team and the fight will come to you regardless.

Personally I believe many pets need a revamp, well moreso the whole system such as pet stat scaling and pet ability control for all abilities. In some cases the micromanagement of the pet is increased to play them properly (ala dogs cancelling knockdown every 3 seconds which drops a possible autoattack) than just adding in the ability to tell it to do its knockdown. But anyway I am getting sidetracked, smaller changes to make other pets viable should be made as well (unless the entire system is being redone in which case this is a make work project).

Anyway detailed below are my thoughts on how to attempt to make porcine pets viable.

Forage:
This ability has 3 “cast time” delays

• Pig cast time (1s)
• Pickup cast time (3/4s)
• Use ability (1/2s)
  This is far too much delay to use properly, cut out the pig cast time completely, or automatically put the item in the ranger’s hand. This ability as well can have enemy players in sPvP pick it up (since beta which is most likely the fault of the Raid on the capricorn map w/ hero elixirs). The cooldown of the forages is far too high as well, seed pod (which is the thief stolen ability) can be traited down to 20s for a recharge and this is the best juvenile pig ability which has a 40 second CD for a random chance at it (other choices are 3 second invuln, or 2k heal). Pigs should have this randomness axed out of their abilities and just grant the trademark ability (Pig – Seed Pod, Siamoth – Plasma, Boar – Skull, Warthog – Scale).

Brutal Charge:
2.5 second wind up for a ground target ability (this is ai controlled and the target appears to be locked in at the start of the 2.5 seconds) it never hits. If ranger’s had control over all pet abilities the ground targeting might be useful but its only use will be in PvE as the AI does not move intelligently. either reduce the windup considerably, or speed up the charge + targetting after the 2.5 second windup has completed.

If they change it, they have to allow for the option to refund out gems. I only purchased it for that specific look. Changing the look is like taking my money, and judging from the other armor skins that are offered recolored armors I will not even want the replacement. Why was this action never taken for PvP armor that people exploited to receive, for example there are people with cultural gear that are 20 ranks to low to wear. I guess the difference is that PvE players were directly affected and must be appeased.

I rarely play a light armor class but saw the skin and HAD to purchase it, I will not be satisfied with my gems going to an unknown skin. So let us keep up as this was not our fault, or refund our gems and give us the choice to rebuy the new skin.

Laserbolt.6731:

If SoloQ rank doesn’t really show your skill, and matches are won or lost based on many, many random factors…all outside your personal control…

…then how should you judge how “good” you are? And whether you are getting better?

Do you keep a record of the 1v1s you win? Maybe your class is at a disadvantage 1v1 and that doesn’t matter.

If you play support, how do you know you are making a difference? What would have happened if you were not supporting a fight?

Some people greatly overestimate their ability. Others do not give themselves enough credit.

GW2 is fun, but all the RNG factors make it tough to really know how well you are doing…in my opinion.

Looking forward to thoughtful non-simplistic replies, from perceptive people. Thanks.

You have asked a very hard thing, personally I don’t like to think in terms of “good” or “bad”, instead I like to think of improvements or putting an effort into certain improvements. This is much more easily tracked that trying to rely on a system with too many variables to accurately judge your ranking. Meaning solo queue random team comp etc. For support you can’t really tell for yourself (as you cannot witness what happens when you are not there) you will mostly know by the people you play with, or how well you can peel for your fellow team-mates.

Anyway, set yourself some in game goals to accomplish. Some sample ideas to help you get started, and don’t try to improve on too many areas at the same time or you will just feel overwhelmed. Just add on one to two more things you want to focus on for a week then gauge how far you have improved on it. Personally I should get back on doing that

Solo Queue:
-Pay more attention to the minimap and the new system implemented for seeing enemies on the minimap. (allows for smart rotations)
-Call out numbers in every teamfight and audbily say when someone arrives or leaves a teamfight.
-Use call target and assist target more often.
-Peel out of fights where your team has over-commited players (only if you are not a tank)

Team Queues:
-Call out numbers in teamfights
-Call out timers (respawn on forests, buff timers on temple)
-Call out stomp timers

DoYourBestBear.6810:

To Patrick, stop calling me Darce, I don’t even know who that is

You know who Darce is, don’t you dare lie about it. You are Darce.

Lordrosicky.5813:

This is BS. The reason the people at the top have lower win ‘s is because they aren’t actually the very best players in solo q. ATM the leaderboards are young and so there are bad players there who were lucky enough to get good teams over the 4-5 games they played. Sample size will gradually lower these people to their appropriate rating which can usually be seen by their win %. Having a win % of around 70 without syncing is more or less possible for the very best players running the very best builds. An elite warrior or spirit ranger could easily do this, as those classes are so versatile.

With the sample size you will not gain a 70% win rate. Why do I say this? because you are not controlling your entire team. The top people will constantly be playing against a mixture of players comprising of the top as well. unless one player is genuinely so good he carries the rest of his team everyone will end up breaking around a 50% win percentage (if the system is working properly to make even teams).

Team queue is an entirely different animal however where you control your full team, playing in that position leaves no team shuffle and higher win ’s than 50 are going to be normal at the higher end.

Sensotix.4106:

Torment: change the skill so it does double dmg while the target is not moving (in a game where good positioning and movement is a key to win a fight moving should not be punished) it also can lead to nice combinations with stun and immobilise

I think it should also be noted that torment is designed incorrectly for one of the implementations. The warriors torment lasts too long to not move, the ability should be low duration high damage if you move so it actually feels like something different and not just another damage condi.

Archaon.6245:

Abusing faulty mechanics isn’t supposed to be an exploit? And aren’t exploits bannable? Just saying…

Vertical teleportation is the result of a faulty mechanic, just saying…

Acandis.3250:

Solid breakdown. Though this in an inherent problem with the mechanics of the game and the way many of the traits have been implemented. In order to fully fix the problem, the entirety of the following would have to be reworked:

• Passive application of conditions
• Passive removal of conditions
• Type of conditions available to each class
• Amount of condition application available to each class

ANet is going the wrong way by giving the wrong classes more access to condition removal, rather than notching down conditions in every other class.

Agreed, condition removal is getting crazy, I think what should be done is toning down the access to conditions AND condition removal. as well as access, any crit condi traits should be removed/revised as this bypasses the new “design intent”. I also believe that the remaining condition removal should be updated on AoE in order to add to group collaboration. Condition application on autoattacks should be completely removed, and power damage scaled back on auto’s as well.

Khylo:
Traps/Nades: Cannot be used on the roof of clock tower
Traps: Cannot be thrown from the clocktower point to the rafters

Rieselle.5079:

Defaulting to ready defeats the purpose of a ready button?

Correct, last person loading in would instantly start the game. This is the opposite of the ready button’s function.

cymerdown.4103:

Eurantien.4632:

But then do you really want a stealthed jaguar stacking bleeds on you that deal the same amount of damage as the ranger’s bleeds? Not to mention with sun spirit the pet is also stacking burning, so then it actually is a 1 v 2 against a ranger. At least with the current system its like 1 v 1.5.

No, he’s not saying pet stats should match the Ranger’s. He’s saying that the pet stats should scale with the Ranger’s. In other words, instead of pets having fixed stats based on the Ranger’s level, the pets would have a coefficient for each stat to multiply against the Ranger’s stat. For example, in the case of your Jaguar, maybe the Condition Damage coefficient for it is 0.5. So, if the Ranger has 1400 Condition Damage, the Jaguar would have 700. All stats for all pets would work this way: Birds would scale really well with Precision and Power (great companions for power Rangers) whereas bears would scale really well with Vitality and Toughness (work best with Soldier amulet setups). Having it this way would make it impossible to have these tanky condition builds that also have burst potential through their pet, because you wouldn’t have the Power or Precision stat base to scale any of the pets well enough. Instead, you would take cats or spiders to supplement your condition output.

This ^
Right now no condition pets are viable so every condition spec ranger opt’s not to take them. By adding in scaling you are weakening the power pets that are always taken by condition rangers and perhaps adding in variability to pet selection (although dogs -the control pet- can be taken by power OR condi). Right now the only reason to take condi pets is to supply trash conditions because they do not do significant damage (poison, cripple, chill, immob, vuln, weakness, etc).

And like what has already been said, pets do not fully scale, they take a coefficient of rangers ability scaled towards their initial purpose. This would stop tank rangers from doing burst damage through dps pets, but they would still add to their survivability. Instead we might see bunker rangers taking Moa’s, power rangers might become viable instantly because they would actually have greater burst due to pet scaling.

Other things that need fixing are the pathfinding in areas for PvP maps, for example clocktower on the rafters dropping into the middle has your pet wandering around the entire raters then into the middle (this pretty much makes you lose you condi removal for 20s, its not a ranger only problem as well). Non damaging falls should be allowed to be taken by pets, and they should be able to climb items a player can jump up while in combat.

The main thing is though that if pets ever gain the ability to attack while on the move their auto-attacks will have to be supremely destroyed damage wise, which I am actually okay with. I actually believe all sources of auto-attacks should be trivialized to put more emphasis on dodging problematic skills instead of dodge spam.

Anyway just my thoughts.

Fomby.4295:

Take away the damage buff, give 6 secs of stability.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_the_wild
Too much overlap.

ronpierce.2760:

Spirit ranger has high defense but not because of spirits. Its because 5 points into wilderness survival + sword/dagger + short bow = a kitten ton of evades. Those “tools” are universal. Spirits themselves have an aoe 2 second immob and a blind on decent cooldowns, unusable if the spirit is dead, 0 stunbreakers and no on demand condition removal. Yeah, I’ll stick by my statement that SPIRIT rangers have little to defend themselves outside of what rangers can all do.

Actually untrue, much of a spirit ranger’s survival is tied in to the protection spirit and protection on dodge roll with dodge grants protection. The reason this is different from “other rangers” is that WS tree is also the tree the grants 30% boon duration with forge runes this is 50% duration giving 3s protection on every dodge (7~s dodge regen) and kitten with a 10s CD. This is 13% more protection on dodge rolls, and an with the addition of spirit around an 85% uptime of protection (plus dodge time isn’t factored in). This is all in addition to the body blocks of projectiles that happen to randomly hit one of the spirits or the elite spirits constant heal.

I find it saddening that instead of hitting the spirit ranger directly for its survival craziness, the changes are to make the elite spirit more accessible with spirits move. This also will be coupled with an overall arching ranger survivability nerf to endurance regen. Sad days.

The only issue is cast bars go against the design intent of the game and they are only good for one player at a time but when you need to keep track of multiple people it starts becoming useless. Cast bars also open up the field to use a program (due to fixed location) to track the cooldowns of your opponents for you. I am VERY against cast bars due to the detection capability that ANet has to police such abuses. Fix the options for the ability to view “all humans” etc while being able to see yourself as any whatever you set yourself as, that way no one gets upset for not playing “their character”.

manveruppd.7601:

Pollution.8703:

Another pvp improvement I think you guys could make would be to normalize character sizes in pvp.

I think this would be a great idea actually but I’m guessing a lot of people would hate it. It wouldn’t be very hard – they did it for Super Adventure Box.

Normalizing character models does not go far enough. The reason I say it does not go far enough is because races each have their own individual animations for abilities this is a barrier to entry for all players as instead of learning five abilities per weapon per class, you have to learn 25 abilities per weapon per class. I hope that one day there will be an option similar to the team colors drop down to view all players as “human”.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

the forum search function seems a bit broken to me.

i had better results using google when i search for my previous topics.

search function is now powered by google

Sidenote: I think what we all need to do is make engies with net turret, rifle, and ze pull. nothing more fun than just spamming emmobs until one lands for free skyhammer kills.

Justin ODell.9517:

I’ve mentioned in previous threads that I plan on including additional information like profession, play style, etc., when forming matches. When I get further along with what I’m currently working on we will put out a blog post and start a discussion about the details of matchmaking.

There are also several threads talking about how to handle the 4v5 problem. Personally, I like the idea of both filling empty positions from the queue, and not recording the game as a loss if your team had fewer players for a significant amount of time. I don’t know yet if we want to include this topic in the matchmaking discussion or if it would be better as it’s own thread.

We are also discussing ideas on how to better introduce new players to solo and team arena that won’t ruin the experience for other players.

Soloq only

Do you also think you can include “something” to allow players to wait longer for more people around the same skill level? I think most people right now are misinterpreting their match rankings/wins. I remember that poll that ANet put up a while ago about “would you rather wait longer for a better match” which people ended up voting overwhelmingly in favor of “get me matches fast”. Get me matches fast, which we the playerbase voted for is the problem, in order to get faster matches you have to just accept everyone who enters queue in order to expedite the matches in a small community. This pretty much means you can be high leaderboard ranking while still having players at lower PvP ranks in the same match. I think the algorithm needs to be tweaked against the earlier poll and make it so players are around the same rating before starting a match.

The matches right now are usually balanced teams, don’t get me wrong. I find that I usually have two competent players on my team, the other two are usually very bad. The problem with the system is that the game is usually decided upon not by which team has the best three players (because skill level differentiation at higher levels is quite small), but it is decided by the two “other players” you have. This is what I believe is frustrating people.

So… can we please put in a button that allows you to play games with people in a certain rating % of you? Personally I would wait 30 minutes for a game with 10 players being adequate… well any both teams having a bunker

No, this would be “cool” but also completely overpowered.

jmatb.6307:

I think they’re okay with that for Mesmer and Guardian, because of the way that Deceptive Evasion and Selfless Daring work. There dodging has utility.

Thief and Ranger have weapon skills that evade too so it makes sense to limit their vigor uptime. Engis can already get 50% end regen through traits, so it also makes sense for them to have to build 30 Tools if they want to dodge as much.

Ranger and Thief needed the nerfs to vigor pretty badly, especially S/D. Just to troll around I did a hotjoin and dodged 9 times in a row vs. a Mesmer just to see how many I could do. It was totally ridiculous.

Actually Rangers don’t have a good source of vigor anymore, it was removed a while back with the vigor on healing spring ticks. the only decent trait for “vigor” was the 50% trait which is being nerfed now as well. I don’t mind as long as all vigor dealing traits/abilities are cut back as much as these classes are.

Your argument to nerf rangers “vigor” does not hold water either, those evades are a defensive cooldown attached to weapon abilities, they are similar to block/teleports/distortion/DS+condi transfers that other classes get. Many classes with a shield gain a 2 second block which is higher than any single evade a ranger has access to on a weapon ability.

Anyway, lower all teh vigorz

CachoDm.4639:

the manvil rock one is mainly for teams isnt it? I think you should do it ill be great to talk to people on your soloQ teams but I wonder if they’re actually gonna get on and talk to people o.o

It’s for anything to do with sPvP, it has random lobbies etc. If you want to create your own little nook some of the admins are kind enough to make you your own little retreat, or if the sPvP rooms are all full, to make more space. Come on in

Zanryu.3417:

I’m curious to know why a Ranger 15 Trait is now better than a Warrior’s 25 trait.

Mighty Swap gives both the Ranger and their pet 3 stacks of Might upon the pet being activated. This can occur every 10 seconds.

Versatile Power gives the Warrior 1 stack of Might upon switching weapons. This can occur every 10 seconds, or 5 when using the minor trait Fast Hands.

Even with 15 points in Discipline the Ranger now has better access to Might AND it affects their pet as well. In what ways do you believe this to be a balanced trait?

Also, I’d like to point out that Thieves and Guardians get 10% damage while their Endurance is not full while Warriors only get 3%. Shouldn’t the Warrior trait be brought up to a similar level?

Mighty Swap can only in fact occur every 20 seconds (16 if traited 15 into BM) Versatile might is also a Minor when Mighty Swap is in fact a Major. The other thing that you need to realize is that the pet is included as the ranger DPS, so giving it to both ranger and pet is like giving might to any other class. if you take fast hands the minor trait would actually be pretty much the same, but much less susceptible to boon removal as it is a multi-source boon. Now let us look at rangers access to might beyond this trait…
Rangers:
Call of the Wild 1 stack of might on a 35s cooldown
Mighty Roar 5 stacks of might 15s CD (no one takes the pet to use this ability as they are too squishy to fully utilize in teamfights)
Blast Finishers in fire fields – 2 (One on warhorn 35s, One on drake pet – uncontrolled)
Beastmaster’s Bond (when your pet’s health reaches 50%)
Beastmaster’s Might (upon signet activation)

Warriors:
For Great Justice 3 stacks of might for 25s on a 25s CD
Battle Standard 1 stack 10s reapplies every 3 seconds
Signet of Rage 5 stack 30s duration
Blast Finishers into firefields – Arcing Arrow, Call to arms, Banners X4, Stomp, Earthshaker, Stomp (rampage form), Banner replant – not really worth it.
Forceful Greatsword (upon critical hit with greatsword or spear)
Mighty Defenses (upon blocking an attack)
Quick Breathing (when removing torment or weakness)
Reviver’s Might (to allies after reviving someone)
Short Temper (upon an attack being blocked)
Versatile Power (when swapping weapons)

Yup… fear the might stacking power ranger…

Kwll.1468:

This might sound harsh but in my opinion hotjoin shouldn’t give you rank points to begin with.

I agree with this a bunch, hotjoin should be for fun, not grinding. Who knows we might get a healthy tournament population if people do their grind in tournaments (and possibly become better players for it)

rpfohr.7048:

First i will expain the idea and the why and how it is balanced

split traps into 3 traits

Trappers expertise: traps are twice as large
Master trapper: traps use ground targeting and have 900 range
Trapper potency remains as it is.

As a long time trapper. I really feel this needs to happen for the following reasons

Aoe is the way in wvw and the 900 range would be excellent for rangers to compete on a team level more. Ranged Aoe is too dominated by necro. I’ve tried melee train ranger and its very difficult if not near impossible. Sword makes it tough to stay on leader cause of animation forcing me to pickup gs and axe/x which leads to subpar damage on a medium clas armor. Not worth it. 900 trap range out be enough to bring interesting frost and fire combo feels from a good distance.

Splitting the ground target and larger traps could bring about interesting melee trap builds where the ranger doesn’t have to pick up ground target. This can become more potent in dungeon and roaming builds. I also think it would be an spvp boost and give a better option to zone with melee.

In my opinion this would be balanced as you need to pick up 3 trap traits instead of 2 but 900 range is sexy. Snare builds. Imagine spike plus frost trap power builds at 900 range.

This would require consolidation of two traits. Perhaps carnivorous appetite and another pet trait in that tier.

Any thoughts?

Why are you asking for a base nerf to traps. When you break the trait into multiple selections you are not increasing viability at all. What you are doing is limiting the viability of something. As an example one of these would need to be a tier 1 trait, if not traps overall become worse, this would remove a single trait access from the trap ranger overall. If both “new traits” were tier 2, you could only have throw traps OR larger traps which is a gigantic nerf. The ability to throw traps on your feet already exists within the current system, but also have more than that available as options. The option to zone with melee already exists thrown traps increase your options, and does not limit you in any way.

The Range increase would be nice, there are many spots in Battle of Khylo for example that are that force you to fully jump in clock tower exposing yourself to danger when both engies/necro’s can zone across the area.

Knote.2904:

zone.1073:

Knote.2904:

You can’t turn.

You can turn – just not manually. Press your skills without trying to move and your character automatically rotates to face the target.

Since when does this work?

This doesn’t work for most of my skills, they just go on cooldown, because my character can’t turn to face the target lol.

You are correct, what they should be saying is MANY classes ignore the rooting feature of imobilize with their autoattacks. For many ranged weapons this is not true, of note are ranger shortbow autoattacks (only refacing ability is quick shot), and I believe all longbow attacks (ranger). I do know that the warrior rifle does not really care about the immobilize and autotracks (this makes pretty much all of their ranged abilities available by aa cancels if they do not track in immob). I just wish it was consistent across all weapons/classes.

zone.1073:

Join queue.

10 minutes later…

Queue pops.

Are you ready? Click Yes. (1 minute remaining)

Less than 10 players clicked Yes within 1 minute = all players are removed from queue. Must manually rejoin the queue…do NOT automatically return to queue after a fail start.

No requirement to manually rejoin unless you were the one who did not click the “ready” button.

You could get more complicated and try to take what kind of build each person is, but that would be much more work to figure out.

You could queue under a specific role, that would take any guesswork out of it I suppose.

The Necro… with an amazing thread necro.

I think in order to do this properly I believe a dual numerical system has to be used. By this I mean you implement MMR to make that matches closer in skill level, and then you make their numerical ranking independent of MMR to give the actual player rating in relation to other people.

The problem right now is that we are using a full blown chess system where the rating itself is the achievement, since we have no access to such things we quantify by our ranking based off of other players, which Glicko/Elo isn’t always the best model to use for actual rankings. I think it is probably one of the best to find a team to play of similar ranking (given a sufficiently large sample size), but like was mentioned previously, when you throw the decay up too high you start getting very bad matchmaking.

My suggestion is to keep the Glicko rating where it is, alongside it however should be added in a numerical system that takes your current “2nd rating” into account versus your opponents MMR. The reason you use 2nd rating vs MMR is twofold, one is to counteract a team that leaves the game for a long period and decays their MMR ranking from “bombing” the rating of a team on their arrival back, and the second is that if they win they gain bonus points (but not immediately vaulted back to their previous proficiency). I will call in “Shown Rating” for the examples below.
Team AFK vs Team 4Life

Victory for Team AFK:
Team AFK rating adjustment: Uses AFK Shown Rating vs 4Life MMR
Team 4Life rating adjustment:Uses 4Life Shown Rating vs AFK MMR
after this is taken into account it recalculates each teams MMR as it does currently. The key point would be to show that Team AFK does not vault back into their former glory, it does increase in rank but will be required to catch back up in points rather than just coming back from a break session, it requires some work. In the same way the 4Lifer’s since it is using team AFK’s MMR (which is still significantly high) they do not lose that much rating. This keeps both teams happy with their situation.

Now consider the reverse:
Victory for Team 4Life:
Team AFK rating adjustment: Uses AFK Shown Rating vs 4Life MMR
Team 4Life rating adjustment:Uses 4Life Shown Rating vs AFK MMR
after this is taken into account it recalculates each teams MMR as it does currently.
In this case 4Life would gain ranking for someone on par with their MMR, not their current standing in the leaderboards, they are rewarded due to a suspected difficult fight (if it was not the MMR will sort it out eventually). Team AFK will lose next to no rating as their ranking is much less than what the MMR matched them for. This as well makes both teams happy.

Anyway might just be my rambling but I think it might be worth a look through. This way you can be harsh on rating decay and probably tier it so that the top 5% lose X amount per day, playing will cover these losses (on the shown rating) and then when you get out of the top 10-20% you can start being much more lenient (or removing entirely) the decay.

Kilandros.2098:

Does Emphatic Bond continue to transfer conditions to your pet when your pet dies?

Think of it like a bad uncontrolled version of cleansing ire, but you have to double the cooldown and it slowly kills your pet.

I’d like to add the following:

• Party frames not differentiating between Death Shroud and HP pools (give us a different color? or something that tells us he’s not going to die soon).
• Pet Condition Bar
• Downed Condition bar (Advantageous for timing blind pulses)
• Fully Controllable Pets (With the option for auto cast to not overwhelm seasoned Rangers)
• Lingering Projectile Destruction effects (Guardian is pretty much the only offender w/ its knockback on rez and shield knockback)
• Change Rez Immunity + Downed Immunity to “Take No Damage” (effect of endure pain) to allow for early condi stacking and condition pressure on downed bodies as conditions take some time to get rolling.
• Downed State inequality, a little bit of inequality is fine but certain abilities in downed state can guarantee your survival (Ele, Thief, mesmer) with a single rez utility on your team.
• More active condition removal for ranger (Perhaps a trait lower in the trait line, or new abilities placed in a different line to allow for more build diversity (maybe something in the marksman tree)

Response:

9, Nature of renewal. So broken and frustrating. Gives you massive advantage in team fight. No counter play as killing it resses anyway. Massive HP. Massive healing. Full condi cleanses. It is just way too good.
There is counterplay, it does not have stability and its rez can be interupted via stun, daze, fear, knockback etc. It can also be focus’d and killed very easily.

15, Emphatic bond – passive condi removal is lame. End of.
Why not throw out Cleansing Ire(20 pt trait) which can happen every 5 seconds removing equivalent conditions and controlled by the player (ie use it when important). Empathic is twice the CD, easiy to counterplay as it is on a schedule, and is 30 points into a condition line

I was actually thinking about the “OP Team” vs “clearly lower MMR Ranked team”. The only thing that came to mind is that instead of searching for 10 closely matched players and then starting at the top and putting players on either side of the match, the system prioritizes finding a team for five, once it finds that team of five it will try to match vs another team of similar rank… then lets the boundaries grow and grow until they find a team.

If it was changed to the other way, players would experience more even battles, and possibly have queues popping at a faster rate.

This is all just an educated guess though.

You’d think it would be associated with a rez, I was always wondering how they were going to use a symbol of rebirth as a finisher.

Lorian.4028:

Kolisch.4691:

To anyone who just started to dabble in traps, remember that if you carry torch on one of your off-hands, flame trap is redundant. It’s kind of a newbie mistake that I only figured out many weeks after working out a rotation for pvp.

Except bonfire is not a trap and does not have ground targeting. Better off with a Axe/warhorn for the new blast finisher, or Axe offhand for the 100%phys projectile and whirl finisher.

Or you could just use dagger offhand which Increases your poison up-time to 100% on both weapon sets while giving you an extra dodge (increased survivability) adding an additional cripple (if you double dog it is quite a high cripple percentage). which means you can drop viper’s nest and take sun spirit (untraited so you have to learn to actually hide it) and you will see 100% burn uptime as well, while increasing your bleed stacks at the same time and losing… pretty much nothing.

I agree with your idea because the original nerf was aimed at elementalists access to frost aura, causing some classes to be hugely punished for hitting into it (due to the timer it is up you pretty much needed to play into it). I agree that frost aura may have been a little too powerful but perhaps the duration of the chill could have been adjusted instead of deciding to hurt all of the abilities (Chaos armor, Fire shield, Shocking aura, frost armor).

It was not like the nerf was placed equally on all abilities either, for example frost armor has a higher duration, and a 1s recharge CD and grants 10% dmg reduction, shocking aura has a 4s duration and a 2s recharge CD no bonus, and fire shield has a regular duration (5s) while having the 1s recharge CD and gives 1 stack of might on trigger. Chaos armor in the latest patch was brought in line to have a recharge cooldown similar to the others, however it was not granted any bonus as it already had a positive effect on it. However due to these treatments that seem to be more for “consistency” than for actual balance we have to throw in the spoiled brother of all these abilities, retaliation. Why is this the only one to have a super high uptime, while at the same time has no interval recharge? I am for all the defensive abilities being treated equally and I believe removing the interval recharge from all of them (while removing the positive added effects) would increase the ability to distinguish a good player from a bad player, while also lowering certain powerful passive abilities effect by duration (frost) and re-evaluating others based on power and uptime (retal) so these passive effects can be used to swing fights based on skillful deployment of an ability.

Just my thoughts though.

side rant:
It seems as the patches come through a bunch of effort has gone through to NORMALIZE the skill level of players. This is the opposite of what any game going for e-sports should be doing. In order to bring out the fan base and impress people you have to be able to showcase skillful implementation of classes, showing that it can be played at a higher level. If all the skill levels are going to be artificially limited (such as pet abilities not being fully controlled) then the skill level difference will not be observed by a casual observer which is a large problem.

Ryan.9387:

By disconnecting you are being the leaver DC=Quitting for the four other people left without an ally.

I wish that if you had a leaver that would take 50% of the loses in MMR from each team-member they imposed their selfishness upon after the second time.

Active player on losing team: 50% of intended mmr loss
Missing player on losing team: 100% Personal loss + 50% loss per team member.

And for wins as well:

Active player on a 4 player team that won: 100% of personal gain + 50% of leavers gain
Missing player on the winning team: -100% of personal gain

I am more for an active punishment of leavers through ratings and a shielding of their victims instead of a penance system where their team-mates are equivalently punished. You would also have to shield this from potential exploits by granting an immunity after a certain score is reached (as in we are losing omg, sacrificial lamb DC now and save our ranking)

Sol.4310:

Trait Vigorous Spirits – Rework the trait so it only gives a 15% better chance of providing their benefits. That brings it down to 50% chance across the team rather then 70%. (Condition heavy team’s really shine with the bonus that Sun Spirit offers, this will also help balance the condition meta)

The percentage is irrelevant next to the 10s CD for example 35% on hit gives around a usual 12s recycle time whereas 70% is about an 11s recycle time. Meaning that any nerf/buff to it is very meaningless as you are literally being given 1 second of free time. Frost Spirit being the exception of course.

Sol.4310:

Trait Nature’s Vengeance – Rework so when a spirit is killed it has 50% chance of triggering its active skill. Currently Storm Spirit (Call Lightning) and Spirit of Nature (Nature’s Renewal) are rather strong when they are killed vs some builds. Rather then removing the effect from play just make it chance based.

Randomness is not what I want in the game, keep it in how it is and modify the call lightning damage to scale with ranger power and then it will be in a good place. Also fix storm spirits passive to be somewhat useful. Chance based things are not good for gameplay (reword all the random procs you can get from engie as well) Perhaps you can make it so that it requires and uses the charge of the active ability instead of being separate from it, this way it mitigates the amount of times it can be used.

Sol.4310:

Elite Skill Spirit of Nature – Nature’s Renewal should have cool down of 60 seconds, this would make the game more tactical. Would force the ranger to pick between using it as team condition remove or team revive.

30s already requires you to decide between the two already. the active ability is a 4 min cooldown which is on the highest end of the available rez utilities, if your spirit lasts the 30 seconds to throw off a second active then it deserves to have a shot at it.

Sol.4310:

Spirit AI Improvement – Make Spirit’s sit behind the ranger within 180 radius, this would be major improvement, it will stop the spirits from behind able to body block, it will also help the ranger with placement of the active skill and improve the general mitigation of damage spirit’s normally take.

How about we just have the ability to tell specific spirits to “stay”, for example each spirit will have to use “stay” before their active ability can be used. In this way they can be planted out of harms way and still be useful. This would also have a negative effect that if you told one to stay it would not follow you again until it’s active has been used, but I figure that will help more skilled play. (perhaps even have a trait for ranged casted spirit actives)

The Approach you mentioned will make actually landing a spirit active horrible as they filter behind you making them much harder to land than a bomb especially with their 2s activation time (normal spirits). Through all the ideas though it would also require an inspection of the active cast times. With this feature as well spirits health pool can be lowered to a reasonable amount making them much more reasonable to kill in small engagements.

Anyway those are my thoughts on … your thoughts.

Zelulose.8695:

The trait, Automated response Stops all conditions at 25% hp from being applied. Given so many classes play condition builds, this one trait can make almost all condition builds useless vs engineers. It also allows them to troll in a map. Three condition players may not even be able to take down an engineer with this trait on.

My suggestion, please give the trait a cool-down or allow other players to remove conditions as well as the engineer can.

I agree, in order to balance this we must give out a class immunity to physical damage below 25% HP. Only way to balance it properly.