Guild Wars 2

Not much to say other than the fact I agree 100%. I’d very much enjoy the rewards being a lot less and paced out throughout the course of the week. I had a casual weekend with my friend Sladi and some of my other casual WvW friends from my casual guild. All of us had a fun, but casual, time casually working our way up to the diamond chest a day or so after the world versus world match reset, which we casually attended.

I too have enjoyed leading private guild raids this week, but in the back of my mind is always the guilt associated with not utilizing the wonderful commander tag feature so my server friends know where our siege battles will take place so they too can experience the joy, thrill and glory of capturing objectives with us for our world whilst contributing to the fight on their favorite classes such as druids, thieves and engineers. Recent posts in this forum have awoken me to how excluded these friends feel, and as a person that is well known for my niceness and inclusive nature it hurts me to think that these friends may struggle to find us. Having less pips so I can enjoy being rewarded with claim tickets all week would most definitely encourage me, like with my friend Sladi, to publicly command much more often which I feel would be of huge benefit to my world.

Thank you for your consideration, ANet friends.

The problem is with the game’s population, tbh. The percentage of top players is tiny compared to the rest of the population and it is sometimes impossible to create “balanced” matches for top players when they’re queuing if there are no other top players in their pip range or queuing to put on the opposing teams to counteract them. Even when there is, it comes down to which top player can farm the other team’s bads harder in many cases.

Even the inherent concept of matching top players vs top players to try and create “balanced” matches is awkward as you end up with a potential scenario of them having to play at a really high level and trading wins back and forth for pips in the lower leagues whilst more average players get easier matches and propel ahead, despite being less skilled in actuality. There are honestly many players in Diamond/Legend right now who legitimately have no business being higher than Sapphire/Ruby if the league placements were a true indicator of skill; they’ve just grinded their way there in hundreds of games on a ~50% win rate even against terrible opposition.

The goal of leagues should be to improve one’s MMR rating to progress. Your MMR rating could translate into pips in the current system if it needed to. Top players with top MMR should start in Legendary division and there should be rewards for competing in matches at the highest level. Players below this with vastly superior win rating to 50% in the lower divisions obviously don’t belong there and their MMR would be adjusted accordingly and so would their pips/division to reflect that. This would be the closest system that reflects skill, but it also has at least two issues: 1) Legend queues would take forever if other top players weren’t online and queuing because of the low population of skilled players; 2) People’s sense of “progression” would be a lot slower. Rewards would have to be adjusted accordingly to make the desire to put in the time needed to improve as a player worth it.

Duo queue, Sapphire -> Legend:

http://i.imgur.com/tn1ZgUi.jpg

Solo queue, Amber -> Legend:

http://i.imgur.com/r0OpsET.jpg

Doesn’t really matter what the matchmaking system is. If you’re a good player you can usually prevail if you can carry hard enough and play around the mistakes of your team. The struggle is most definitely real at times, however. Sometimes you need to literally play like a god to win and sometimes even that’s not enough.

The simple fact is, a druid simply isn’t needed in large scale public zerg fights as any potential roles it fulfills are performed better by other classes.

In large scale zerg fights, it’s all about the boons, CC and AoE damage. Any class incapable of providing these things on a substantial scale isn’t really part of the large scale “meta”. Thieves aren’t “meta”, engi/scrappers aren’t “meta” and druids aren’t “meta” all for similar reasons: because they’re competing for spots in a group when any potential roles they fulfill are simply performed better by other classes, or other classes offer more by way of versatility.

Is it possible to play a “backline druid” without being completely dead weight? Sure. But you’ll probably be inherently contributing less than other, meta classes around you. Highlighting this is not a slight on the player personally; it’s just the way the class works even when played to its absolute fullest capacity when compared with other things. The singles you pick off with a longbow are either going to get rezzed or their loss is going to be inconsequential to the outcome of a fight anyway whereas the elementalist next to you who just downed 5+ people with a single meteor shower is pulling a lot more weight. The water fields you provide can be provided by elementalists just as well. The barrage you use on downed enemy groups would be a lot more effective if it were a lava font, meteor shower or necro wells.

You say “WvW is meant to be all-inclusive” but that’s an opinion and not fact. Commanders run their squads the way they want to and not all commanders and guilds have the same mindset when playing the game mode and as a player it is important to recognize that. Some commanders play “for fun” and let people run whatever they want. That’s great and all and maybe they’ll even win some fights if they outnumber their opponents or are fighting similarly disorganized militia groups. As soon as they come up against a highly organized group though they’ll likely be punished for playing suboptimally. Other commanders/guilds are only having “fun” when they’re winning fights, on the other hand, and treat WvW as a competitive PvP game mode. They will prioritize winning fights at any cost and by ensuring people are running meta classes with solid builds which are in synergy with their party and the rest of the group more broadly.

You’ll often notice a lot of the hardcore fights players with the latter mindset rarely, if ever, follow the “play whatever you want for fun” commanders; myself included. The reason for this is often that we recognize our approaches are completely different and our mindsets are often incompatible. We’d not have fun following such a group and the group wouldn’t have fun if such players became vocal and criticized their approaches or composition. The same should be expected to be true if you’re a casual player and you’re attempting to follow a more hardcore group. If you’re not willing to deal with the personal criticism that often comes with the territory or being told to switch classes for the wider benefit of the group overall and removed from the squad, you should simply stay away and follow the “for fun” commanders or form your own group and run it the way you want. You have no inherent right or entitlement to be in our squad or to play with us if you’re not willing to conform to the group’s approach and playstyle and you shouldn’t expect the commander and/or group to change their mindset purely to accommodate you, just as we don’t expect other commanders to change their approaches to accommodate us either.

As an aside, I define “team player” as someone who is versatile and willing to play whatever class would benefit the group most in any given situation. My main is obviously elementalist, but you’ll sometimes see me play guardian, necro, revenant or whatever else is needed by the group at the time despite me often having a lot less personal fun performing those roles. Ranger/Druid is actually my preferred 2nd/off-main which I use in sPvP a lot but rarely bring to WvW because I recognize its limitations. This is playing for the team. People who are rigid and almost militant in their class choices are not team players and are usually very undesirable to have around for almost any group. If you truly wish to be a team player, consider the needs of the team first and foremost and be flexible in your class selection and what role you play so you can, for example, hop on a guardian occasionally when the group is crying out for them, rather than staying fixed into playing longbow zerk druid come hell or high water. Only then will you gain respect as a player among more hardcore groups. If that’s too much for you, just stay away from us and continue playing how you want elsewhere because you’re not going to change our approach to WvW which we’ve held for 4 years just as we’re seemingly not going to change yours.

With love!
- Tiff

Please don’t ruin a decent map by trying to fix what isn’t currently broken. Thx.

Those dastardly August Butchers.

It never did trigger on condition damage.

Just hold down the 1 button and it’ll work fine. I’m pretty sure it got broke in the recent patch which made that possible, actually.

Straegen.2938:

vana.5467:

Saw TW streaming last Thursday. Amazing group of about 20 players <snip>

The days of great large skill groups is definitely over if the current TW is amazing. I suppose a group can only get as good as their competition allows but they would get destroyed by the old school GvG groups. Remember the days of Mag GvG or guilds like Agg? Oh the Golden era what a wonder it was.

Different times/different metas. Agreed about lack of competition though, sadly.

There are very few actual good elementalists in the game who understand and play the support role well. Eles shouldn’t be “bunkering” points and taking 1v1s; their true power potential lies in supporting team fights. If you’re forcing an enemy elementalist into 1v1s or watching a single node, you’re at an advantage if you/your team know what they’re doing.

Most bad eles I’ve seen will sit on a point all match whilst the team fights are happening at other nodes and will not rotate into them. This means you should be able to take team fights without the ele being a factor to the outcome (which are almost guaranteed wins if you have an ele on your team who is present in said fights). You can also just ignore them entirely and rotate around the point they’re sat AFK on, making the game a permanent 4v5 in your favor. The remainder of the bad eles who are at least present in teamfights usually just run around in a circle trying to stay alive themselves rather than focusing on healing/supporting the focus targets of the enemy team, thus being an almost non-factor.

Looking at the result of the match in the screenshot, it appears to have been fairly balanced to me. It’s not like you lost 500-0. You’re not going to win all of your games.

The Legendary players are likely at the very start of the Legendary division and you’re likely getting towards the end of Diamond. It makes sense to me that you’re up against players in the early stages of the division above.

There are many things that could be said about matchmaking, but the screenshot presented isn’t particularly remarkable in any sense, imo.

Oh. I thought this was a game where we all played on each others’ accounts or something.

Acandis.3250:

And please don’t tell me that the vendor backpieces are the nice eye-candy for the lower divisions, because I don’t think I will ever see willingly display that on their character.

Hey, I use the Champion’s Wings on my ele cuz they look better than the huge, overbearing wings imo. This cut me deep.

I think it’s possible to create somewhat balanced mixed matches. If I queue with a ruby friend, making the composition 1x Legend 4x Ruby the enemy team could also get a Legend player of similar MMR to myself to balance things out. This would, in turn, give some Legend players faster queue times (maybe this could be optional to allow players to opt-in to being put as a balancing factor into games outside of their own league.)

I dunno. I have fun queuing with others, but there are two ends of the spectrum which are equally not fun. If I queue with a lower tier friend, we wait in queue forever for a match that may be almost impossible for them to perform well in. If I premade with ESL/Pro League friends every match is a stomp as very few things can actually compete vs. such a strong premade team, then people start complaining about premades/matchmaking and it’s actually not even fun either.

For some, you’re literally forced to solo queue for any semblance of fun games which sucks if you enjoy playing with friends. I know this is only an issue for probably a minority of people, but I thought I’d put my view out there. This is why some play alts, then of course people complain Legend players are farming the lower tiers again. Can’t win. :P

Ithilwen.1529:

The “legendary” players are simply re-rolling as ambers and farming the ranks again. I posted screenshots last season of an ESL player running an alt in emerald over a 6 hour period.

Personally I think it would be much better if they did in fact stop playing at legendary and let the rest of us advance instead of trolling.

This is a by-product of ridiculous queue times and no real incentive to play at legendary.

I also play on alts sometimes to play with friends who are not hardcore PvPers who are trying to progress in the earlier divisions. It’s actually really hard to play with my more casual friends on my main account, because the system will drag them into legendary matches making them sit through long queues to play a legendary division match which will make it a lot harder to progress for them if they’re in Sapphire or Ruby.

I resent the fact the system makes it so hard and unfeasible to play with others who are at a different level of progression than you are unless you play alt accounts.

It’s an intended change and it was mentioned in the second post of the patch notes:

Removed PvP League badges from nameplates in WvW.

Should insta-delete your character. Beyond ded.

Friend of mine lost a pip because he tried to switch characters, the server DC’d him during switching and he was late into the match by about 1 minute or so. He played during the remaining ~10 minutes, we won but he still lost a pip for his “desertion.”

You shouldn’t lose a pip if you participated in the majority of the actual match time.

The poll is flawed in the sense that the majority of people generally do not like the DBL at all. They think it’s a bad map for WvW play, even though it was improved slightly since its creation. The reasons why it’s bad from a WvW perspective are well documented and without wholesale changes to the map which would essentially change it into a completely new map entirely, it will never be fit for the purpose for which it is intended.

The issue with this poll is it creates a situation whereby the majority of people who dislike the DBL map, when not given an option for it to not be included entirely, will inevitably pick the option which involves the least amount of DBL possible. A lot of people, therefore, will not pick the rotation option as that would involve 3 months of play exclusively on the DBL map. This is the only reason why I picked the option for mixed BLs, with 2 ABL maps and 1 DBL map: because I want the least amount of DBL, whilst always having an ABL map to play on.

The problem with this is, I do not necessarily think mixing maps in the same matchup is a good idea. If you care about score and having at least the chance of a balanced match, it’s terrible actually. I can envisage the server who draws the DBL having a disadvantage as there’s less incentive for people to defend the towers, they take longer to get to and take back and probably less people (and commanders) on the server willing to port to the DBL and play there in the first place. This could work both ways though as the servers who get the ABL will probably be continually pressured on their home borderlands as there will be lots of people looking to play an ABL map, whilst there could be vastly fewer people pressuring the home BL of the server with the desert map simply because it’s an undesirable map to play for most.

So yeah. I don’t even agree with the option on the poll that I actually chose. I don’t care personally as I don’t care about the match score and play the game mostly for fights on the ABLs, so my choice is conducive to allowing me to have continued access to ABLs without having to wait 3 months. This might not be the healthiest option for the WvW game-mode taken as a whole, however, and it concerns me that this particular poll is so flawed in that sense.

Please add this already. Been asked for many times, including by myself recently. You should see the small HP bars above your teammates’ heads in sPvP whether you’re partied with them or not. Currently it only shows for people who you’re actually in a party with. It should show for all of your teammates. The game should consider all of your teammates as party members in a sPvP setting.

Having HP bars over the heads of some people but not others in sPvP makes no sense.

Rank is irrelevant to the discussion of driver sniping. Any seasoned pin sniper can pick a driver out of the group regardless of rank, class, guild or otherwise within 10 seconds.

Please fully read the notes:

“Rewards from skipped divisions will be awarded after players play one match in the new season.”

No, it does not. It was changed in the April 30 2013 update:

Swirling Winds skill: No longer destroys unblockable missiles.

Agreed. It’s basically impossible to notice auras now unless looking at the buff bar. The aura animations were never the source of the excess visual noise people complained about and I was surprised when they were changed. They should definitely consider bringing the old auras back or having them on a toggle at very least.

JQ “died” for several reasons. One of the first, which has already been touched upon by others, are the clique of individuals mostly from the same few guilds who administrate the community’s infrastructure (website, TS). Some barely play the game at all, but feel they’re in a position to have a lot to say about commanders/guilds or push back on absolutely any suggestion which may widen the distribution of “power” (even “power” as limited as to be able to verify people in TS) which would have made things easier for the community overall.

Nonsense and toxicity surrounding the infrastructure has built up over some time and most certainly played a contributory factor in some individuals and even entire guilds’ decisions to remain or reform on JQ. Many individuals and commanders who left just don’t feel like dealing with the added drama when there are communities which are much more accommodating, open and make the basics much easier. Having recently moved from JQ to TC, let me tell you the difference in the administration and transparency has been night and day.

Now JQ are left with all the “admins” in “power” who are irrelevant to actual WvW with hardly anyone to administrate and who are incapable of actual leading in the game itself. Great job! JQ forgot the number 1 rule: it’s always the actual guilds and commanders who are the most important aspect of any server’s WvW community, and they should be listened to and served by the people running the infrastructure. Always remember that being a admin/mod is a position of servitude and listening to what the people who are actually running things in WvW for the server want and trying to improve things to make life easier for those people, as without them you have no WvW presence at all. It’s not about dictating things, making wide threats about removing entire groups of peoples’ permissions or randomly changing peoples’ statuses or access based on whether you like them or not.

I’m 100% sure the people in “power” right now are fully justifying their actions and supporting each other. I’m sure they’re repeating the mantra that they’re “much better off without those toxic people and toxic guilds anyway” and all agreeing and e-high fiving pretending everything’s ok, because that’s what they’ve always done. It’s an infinite circle of internal self-validation as there’s no-one within the clique to act as a balancing force and say “hey, maybe there is something in what people are saying here.” Most of the people within the community who cared enough to try and change things gave up and left as they grew bored with the drama or just moved on to other games entirely. It is what it is, but it won’t change unless a new infrastructure is created ran by people more fit to administrate and even that won’t bring people back in droves. The damage is already done.

Having said all this, this is certainly not the only reason why JQ is struggling these days. The other half of the story is that people simply got bored both with the game mode and with how match-ups were playing out on JQ. Once upon a time, JQ was ridiculously stacked in most timezones and steamrolling everything consistently becomes boring and makes players either quit or move on to find better challenges. There was a time during EU when JQ could literally queue two separate maps between Kazo and KILL with up to 4-5 commanders running should those guilds so wish, versus maybe 1 commander with 25 on BG and 1 commander with 25 TC on a good day. This went on for maybe 6 months and I barely played personally during this time as logging in to k-train with no meaningful fights was ridiculously boring; I actually chose to form a guild and start commanding on the always-outnumbered SoR server during the height of this as it was more fun fighting in those conditions rather than steamrolling everything with 60 people against a handful of die-hard defenders, who often tried their best against impossible odds. As more guilds/commanders either burned out or realized how pointless forming up consistently to do this was, they either quit or moved to other servers for something fresh and JQ became weaker and weaker as a result. The same is also now happening to YB to a degree as people realized dominating the PPT war against the bored and weakened JQ and always-AFK BG wasn’t exciting gameplay and fighting the same groups of people grew stale, so commanders and guilds move away looking for new challenges whilst leaving the server they transferred away from weaker for it.

Finally, and maybe this is just me, but as an English-speaking player I actually didn’t particularly have fun spending time in WvW on JQ during off-hours outside of my own guild raids. Some of the main off-hours commanders who lead large militia forces don’t use TS or are unable to communicate too well as they’re from SEA countries with only a very basic understanding of the English language. I avoided playing WvW on EU servers as I wanted to minimize the language barriers as communities thrive better when everyone shares the same language and are able to understand one another clearly with limited potential for miscommunication. Half the fun of WvW is the community aspect, and the fun is severely limited when a common language isn’t present. This isn’t the fault of JQ as a server and it isn’t a problem that has a particular solution, but it was certainly a contributory factor to me in my decision to move elsewhere with a higher concentration of native English speakers public tagging.

There are probably many more reasons why JQ is weaker than it has ever been right now, and you could probably write a book detailing the intricate and often complicated inter-personal and inter-guild dramas but I think I’ve wrote enough and documented a few of the main reasons myself and many I know left the server.

That’s awesome and will restore the original functionality. Thanks.

It would be great if HP bars appeared over all teammates though regardless of whether you were partied with them or not in PvP so even when solo queuing you could quickly see the status of teammates around you, or at least have the option to do so.

Cheers.

Hi.

As a QoL update, can we please have the option to display the small health bars above our teammates’ heads in matches? In the recent patch, these were removed from people you were partied with and I personally found them quite useful.

It would be nice if the option showed the health bars on all of your teammates, regardless of whether you were in a party with them or not too for when not grouped. I had hoped they’d fix it someday so this would be the case, but instead now we have no HP bars at all. =(

Thanks!

Sorry, but there’s no-one who can sit there and defend Cloaking Waters, even mildly, with a straight face. It’s an absolutely absurd mechanic to add to the game and is usually only available to be abused by the strongest server on the map to continue crushing the opposing groups. If it were a mechanic available at the spawn of servers who were outnumbered, maybe just maybe it would be justifiable to allow them to break out or launch stealth assaults on their objectives to try and get them back. As it stands though, it’s anti-WvW.

I was available this evening to experience the rush of claiming objectives for my world during reset on EBG with TW, while evidently my server chums in GS were experiencing their own rush on the BLs simultaneously. What a fantastic night for all concerned.

Can we have a pip to gold or pip to gem conversion too, so you can sell your excess pips?

A+ idea.

Solid stealth opening at 0:30. Good sustain in the 1v2 at mid later on, even with your teammate AFK at 0:51. He redeems himself by making a generally solid rotation at 1:18, although 1:42 and 2:46 were definite over-rotations imo.

Could easily have carried that match. May need to work on your Fashion Wars before doing so, however.

Just watched Match 1. Some random observations:

At the start of the game you blast the lightning field with Acid Bomb. That’s good, although this is the first and only time you use Acid Bomb in the whole game. You should be making more use of this skill by deploying it on points during team fights for extra cleave, on downed enemies etc. You can also use it to blast the water field from your Healing Turret for additional healing. Additionally, you can deploy/blast your Healing Turret in the lightning field at the beginning of the game for extra swiftness in addition to the Acid Bomb.

Speaking of healing, you could be getting a lot more value from your Healing Turret if you made better use of the combos available to you. After deploying the water field, you should be using hammer 3 to leap through it for additional heals or the aforementioned Acid Bomb. I don’t think I ever saw you utilize a combo in a water field and this is key to an engi’s high sustain when pressured. Definitely something to learn/work on. Your F1 skill is also a water field which can be used for combos.

The guardian on your team makes some interesting rotations. Gets home decapped by rotating from home -> roads for no real reason, then moves to mid to 5-man it whilst side capped. The mesmer pulls off to deal with close while you sustain mid and get kills at around the 4 minute mark. Your team is in a reasonably good position at this point.

You lose the team fight at mid by 5:30, but your guardian fully capped far and your revenant got the beast steal at home from the necro. It is important to note that you are 4v5 at this point on the map, as your druid disconnected at around 5:25 and took a minute and a half to get back into the game.

You kind of threw after losing the team fight at mid as you rotated, for some reason, from the losing fight at mid to the close neutral area to 1v2 the necro. Rotating to far to +1 your guardian may have been a much better option here, as it was your point and very likely the enemy team would come to plus him from the fight they won at mid. As it stands, he unfortunately lost the 1v1 to the enemy revenant quite quickly anyway but if you were there you could have killed the rev and kept control of far, or sustained the team fight on that node if rotations came in. Your revenant could have disengaged from the necro back to home and your mesmer was on respawn, who could have took the home defense with the revenant if need be. Even assuming doing what you did and rotating towards home was a reasonable call at the time, losing home node whilst you took a pointless and lengthy 1v2 off-node was quite costly.

The game was certainly not over by this point and your disconnected druid got back into the game at around 6:45. You both rotate to home briefly to full cap the point (poor map awareness on your part as you should have seen the druid coming from spawn to do exactly this) and your guardian gets a far decap. He is going to have incoming though as the enemy players who ganked your memser in the roads (the rev and the druid) rotate to defend far. Instead of you rotating to far and taking the 2v2 on a neutral node, you chose to rotate to mid and take the 2v2 on an enemy capped point. Your guardian dies 1v2 and it takes you an eternity to decap mid, then you eventually lose the team fight there.

Meanwhile the guardian off respawn gets another far decap, then attempts to steal the far beast from the necro. He unfortunately fails to get the steal and is left in an unfavorable 1v1 with the enemy necro at the beast area, with the far point being neutral. At this point in time you’re tunnel visioning on pointless fights in the roads below mid. The enemy team is 35 points up and in your mind you should be thinking about what plays you can personally make to win the game. Far is still decapped by this stage and the winning play here is to try and force the 2-cap by going to full cap far, or at least taking the team fight there and hopefully winning it. The guardian could have brought his awkward 1v1 back to the node, or you could have got the gank on the necro then 1v2’d the enemy who rotated into the far node and then fully capped the point. At this point in the game, you would have still won on a 2-cap without needing additional points from kills or beasts.

Instead, you waste time in the pointless roads fight, waste further time by briefly moving towards mid then chose probably the absolute worst option available to you by randomly deciding to 1v2 the close beast which is of zero value to your team whatsoever at this stage whilst the guardian dies to the necro and far gets fully capped by the enemy, taking away your only chance to win the game. The rest of your team continue tunnel visioning on mid and losing the fights. The game is over at this point.

The close nature of the score should tell you that this match was certainly winnable and you could have made the difference necessary to get the W, but missed several opportunities to potentially do so. You may have still lost the game anyway due to situations on the map outside of your control, of course, but you should strive to always play to win and make plays that put your team in the best possible situations. You definitely missed several chances to do so in this match and looking over your gameplay and identifying these potential situations then applying them in future games could certainly help improve your ability to do so.

Only briefly watched match 2, but it’s more of the same. Poor use of healing combos, tunnel visioning on the mid point when it’s an unfavorable fight (especially on Foefire where it’s incredibly difficult to decap mid if they have bunkers there) and pushing far would make more sense, staying in fights where you’re outnumbering enemy elementalists on your capped nodes allowing them to waste your time, etc. All these you should work on.

Good luck.

Riku.1093:

1. The meta-game is always changing, and this build does a decent job as a support build. Whether or not a build is good is purely opinion based and all about the numbers. I’m pretty sure you haven’t tried this build yourself to know what it is capable of.

No, the build is just bad. Plain and simple. I don’t need to try it as it is inferior in every way to the build that I have given you which I use, and certainly inferior in the current meta D/F aurashare build. In the current meta, your build is 100% ill equipped to deal with the meta comps you will be facing time and time again. This isn’t a point of debate or an opinion. That’s just the way it is.

Riku.1093:

3.Staying alive is the most important thing as a healer so that I can continue doing my job as a support build.

Your build has worse survivability that the builds I refer to and the “support” you are capable of outputting, both from a player and build perspective, is seriously lacking.

Now, you can continue to run with your special snowflake build and think you have discovered a gem that has obviously eluded everyone else, including vastly more experienced elementalists who have made legendary already, and disagree with me entirely. That’s fine. Just don’t be surprised to stay precisely where you are now and not improve one bit if you’re not willing to take on board suggestions of how to change your current situation.

“Good” players, even if they’re just beginners in the PvP scene, have sufficient self-awareness of their own inexperience and are always willing to draw off the experience of others and make changes in order to improve. Players who have no hope of ever evolving are the ones who already consider themselves “pro” and reject any suggestion that their own builds or play could be a contributory factor to their losses, and never adapt.

Already told you in an earlier post that your elementalist build is awful and unfit for purpose in ranked and gave you an actual build to use:

Tiffany.8576:

If you’re playing a clerics build you’re playing it very sub-optimally without Rune of the Soldier and shouts for condi removal. Try checking my staff build as a good starting point if you really want to play staff support.

Your build is worse than I expected. Fixing your build should be the first thing you do before anything else if you seriously want to actually stand a chance at doing well.

You cannot expect to climb in a division system with such an awful build and on the off chance that you somehow got lucky enough to progress, you’d get farmed even harder by players who actually know what they’re doing in the higher leagues.

Your general awareness of your teammates’ health around you seems to be pretty poor and your support for them is almost non-existent at times (at 3:30, for example, you come in to plus your Dragonhunter who has 10% HP and you just stand there spamming air autoattacks when you have “Wash the Pain Away!” and a potential Healing Ripple proc up to heal him, at minimum. He should have been at full health almost instantly.) However, you need to fix the fundamentals (such as your build) first before you can work on that. Your video only confirms that lesser experienced players running bad builds are stuck in the lower divisions, which is how it should be in a true division system.

I commend you for posting your gameplay video, but please actually take on board the advice of more experienced players and act on it rather than just repeatedly complaining and changing nothing in order to evolve from your current position and improve. Right now, it is of little surprise that you are struggling in Emerald and you have no right, based on the footage, to blame matchmaking alone for this.

Riku.1093:

New screenshot. Not 1 win in the past 24 hours.

Your staff elementalist build is way off from what is usable in ranked. I mean, you’re taking triple cantrips. Are you playing berserker?! If so, I’m almost convinced you’re trolling if you’re suggesting that you expect to actually do well with such a build.

If you’re playing a clerics build you’re playing it very sub-optimally without Rune of the Soldier and shouts for condi removal. Try checking my staff build as a good starting point if you really want to play staff support.

I think WvW (large scale combat situations) actually requires HoT the least among all gamemodes to be effective, at least for several classes.

Traditional staff elementalist can still run fire/air/arcane or fire/water/arcane and have very good personal survivability with triple cantrips and Evasive Arcana even when running glassy to allow them to output very high DPS in addition to providing water fields, etc. and being able to blast them with earth dodge rolls. Overloads are often not easy to get off in large scale fights as you have to be closer to melee range and you’re very susceptible to being interrupted anyway. I personally prefer running a high DPS build (fire/air – bolt to the heart/arcane) in a large scale group fight setup. Tempest can be used for more organized group configurations utilizing aurashare with proper party compositions but certainly isnt’t a requirement to be useful as an ele, or even optimal in many group situations.

Zerk power wells backline Necro is still a very strong build and one I desire more, more often than not, than reapers. In this pirate ship/ranged meta the traditional backline necro with standard death shroud is more desirable than melee reapers and one I wish more necros still used. Necros are better as a backline class than in the frontline as reapers do not offer that much in terms of party boons or other utility. I’d rather guardians and warriors in my frontline, with zerk necros wrecking things with wells from afar.

A standard stance warrior build without berserker seems more optimal in the frontline to me than anything using the berserker line. A sword/warhorn + hammer warrior with warbanner using tactics/discipline/defense is perfect and adding berserker would actually make the build worse. Berserker is only really useful in niche backline gunflame builds mostly used for pinsniping.

A traditional frontline guardian build is still a solid choice, although for guardians the Dragonhunter line, it could be argued, does have a place in frontline builds as well as specific builds utilizing longbow for coordinated CC bursts.

Obviously roaming is a completely different story and the elite specializations certainly shine much more when building for 1v1 or small scale scenarios, but for general WvW large scale fights I would consider some core builds stronger and more meta than their elite counterparts as I outlined.

In a Utopian situation, this feature would be so good and one which would enhance gameplay immensely. In reality, however, this would suck so much and probably doubly so for females. No thanks. I’ll continue to enjoy picking and choosing who I converse with in private TS servers and accepting the no voice comms limitation which comes with solo queuing. Quite honestly you don’t even need voice comms if your situational/map awareness is good anyway.

CDKeys is legit.

Guys, the WvW Resurgence has already been and gone. This was it, from the latest patch notes:

World vs. World

General

The score tick countdown timer in the top-middle of the screen is no longer 1 minute ahead in WvW maps.

You’re brave for opening yourself up to such public scrutiny. I commend you for doing so.

Only commenting on the first match:

1) You rush into a what is essentially a 1v4 at the start and die almost instantly. This is probably the worst decision to make. You have to know when to play defensively/conservatively and avoid dying in these scenarios. This, I feel, is the #1 way people throw games.

2) The next passage of play is awkward. You push into mid, fail to kill the necro and your teammates actually start dying. This costs you home. You pull off to home, which by the time you get there is full capped, and end up dying 1v2 to the engi and the mesmer. You made poor use of your heal combos and got caught in a gravity well despite the fact you had a stun break available to you. You seem hell bent on fighting on point and being free cast on by the mesmer despite the fact there was no benefit of doing so. I’d have been LoSing like crazy here and probably even pulling back into base for a full reset and waiting to regroup with a teammate as dying 1v2 on an enemy controlled node provides no gain for your team in that particular case. Meanwhile, the thief and warrior decide to massively throw having capped far by inexplicably pushing lord, causing them to lose far and they end up wiping. Absolutely awful play.

3) You spend the next 5 minutes taking the most pointless fight on close point ever. You’re literally fighting on an enemy controlled node and you don’t stand a chance in hell of ever getting it neutral. All the while, mid was yours and being decapped and then subsequently free-capped by the enemy because the warrior, in his infinite wisdom, decided to push lord again (another throw.) This whole passage of play is useless and eventually results in your death. It’s not really a fight you should have been taking as you stood to gain nothing from it and that whole period of time was essentially free points for the enemy whilst they held you there. This was absolutely perfect for them. Again, a common mistake is people getting obsessed with close and fighting there regardless of how little they stand to gain from it.

Having said that, while taking that pointless fight, the thief and warrior decided to continue pushing lord and they eventually killed it, at the expense of losing the far fight and mid point. By which time the game was over.

There were things you could have done better, both rotationally and mechanically with your class, but the throw by the thief and warrior there was huge. You need to make better use of your Function Gyro when rezzing. Several times I notice you just running up to someone and hitting F. This won’t summon the gyro. When you see them go down, you need to be fast with clicking their frame in the party window and hitting F from a distance. This will summon the gyro and then you can go in for the rez yourself.

Overall you had insanely heavy teammates, but you didn’t really excel above the other members of your team there either I feel in that particular game.

Extreme.8350:

Bunker ele on top is this a joke?
They removed all bunker amulets. Except for the ones with only armor/healing.
Its easy as pie for necros to kill them. Their useless.
The only ele build ive seen which works is the one trick pony scepter build.

You’ve obviously not met any good elementalists playing with a cleric’s amulet. Good eles are few and far between, but they are most definitely at the very top tier in this meta when played well.

style.6173:

Bunker ele – A decent ele can easily 1v2 most classes in the game. A really great classes for causing matchup issues elsewhere in the map

Not really. A 1v2 with equally skilled players will force a decap almost for sure on anything other than Foefire mid. There’s no such thing as a “bunker” ele; the meta is “support ele” and while it can hold a node for some time and potentially force matchup issues this is by far not the most useful role it can play.

You want support eles carrying team fights and countering the condi output from reapers through its cleanses. Having a top tier support elementalist in your team fights in the current meta skews the balance heavily in your favor.

In the support role, ele is S tier but it is highly dependent on who is playing it. There’s a big difference between good and average support elementalists and most of it comes down to situational awareness of your teammates’ health and condis in addition to your own, using your cleanses to remove high priority condis at the right times, clutch use of Rebound, etc.

Having decided to play some games on my 0 games played (thus base MMR) account using S/F Fresh Air ele and going on a 10 game win streak, I partially agree with you. The players in the lower divisions right now are clearly very inexperienced (my own teammates included) and seemingly running very poor builds. One player using a viable (if far from optimal) build who knows how to play and can play around their teammates’ constant mistakes can make a big difference to the outcome of such matches in my observation.

That said, the game simply cannot sustain such heavy losses by the ‘grassroots’ players to the point where they do not feel like PvPing anymore, even if they are contributing to their losses due to their own play or poor build choice which many certainly are from my own observations. It’s obvious that a lot of people are being put into matches way beyond their own personal ability and the outcome of those matches isn’t fun for all concerned.

It is important novice players are put into situations which allow them to feel as though they’re progressing whilst gradually improving themselves. Some could argue ranked arena isn’t the place for this and it is natural the below average/beginner players could realistically expect to spend quite some time in the lower divisions, which is fine if looking from a purely meritocratic perspective but not so fine if taking the health of PvP in the long term into consideration. It’s important all levels of player, particularly beginners, have the feeling of: “Yeah, that was pretty epic and definitely something I want to come back and do more of” rather than “screw PvP, I’m not going back there again to get farmed over and over by pros.” You only elicit the former reaction through balanced matchmaking where people feel the result could have gone either way.

Watching Twitch streams of good players helps with the learning process.

On the face of it, I agree that matchmaking needs to be adjusted or looked at as the loss streaks being reported by some players seem unreasonable and unfair. They are obviously being placed in matches way beyond their/their team’s skill level and it is not a fun experience for the majority of players. This needs to be addressed for future seasons.

Having said this, as an experiment earlier I logged on to an account I have never PvP’d with and tried to play amber matches on a S/F Fresh Air non-HoT elementalist. I think we can all agree that isn’t a carry build by any stretch of the imagination, but I still was able to almost get out of amber with a 10 match win streak from the beginning. I only lost 1 game and I won several 1v2s. This isn’t a testament to my skill as much as it telling me that there are very inexperienced players with bad builds presently in amber and if there are still people struggling in amber and emerald the first place I’d look would be your own builds and the rotations you’re making as it seems fairly easy even on an account with base MMR and running a reasonably poor build by today’s standards. I mean, one of my team’s opening splits on Forest was 2 home, 2 to beast and myself to mid, so I just kept them interested at mid without dying and waited for the beast dudes to join the party. Sometimes you have to actively compensate and play around what your teammates are doing, and in order to do that you need good map/general awareness.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, basically it’s a little like professional wrestling. ANet picks the winners and losers before the match, and you just play out your role.

Maybe they are intending to move away from eSports and trying to create their own genre of “eSports Entertainment”.

The class/build you’re playing carries hard against necros, ironically. Why are you taking Aftershock! vs. a 3 necro comp?

Disagree entirely with the OP. I want patch notes to be concise and boring. I find GW2’s easy to read and very easy to pinpoint what has changed.

Forums are for discussion about the specifics of the changes. Patch notes aren’t.

A solid derivative build of the previous. I don’t have “one build” I use right now, it always varies depending on the matchup. I’ve been quite impressed with how clerics performs (the regen uptime is high and the ele has higher self healing than a bunker guard, which is why it seems viable for ele but not so much for guard), but against condi-heavy comps or for a more DPS option Menders seems solid.

I personally prefer playing with staff for the CCs, water fields and heals on water 1/weakness on earth 1 (and will often take Cleansing Water over Powerful Aura whilst doing so), but the Shocking Aura from D/F and the invul is very strong too and perhaps the more tournament-viable option.

Diamond Skin is still a strong condi cleanse, although the “when struck” mechanic makes it worse than I anticipated it would be. Pre-HoT I would mostly use Stone Heart and I’ve been using it more now that DS was nerfed, particularly against power-heavy comps. I will sometimes take Cleansing Fire in place of Lightning Flash if I know I will be under heavy condi pressure.

In terms of sigils, I usually slot Leeching + Transference. I will often switch in Purity against condi-heavy teams. I probably wouldn’t use Hydromancy as a default choice.

You emphasize overloading a lot in the write-up, but when taking Invigorating Torrents over Harmonious Conduit it’s actually very hard to land a full overload channel against competent players. I am generally very choosy with when I can get an overload channel off on every attunement aside from Earth.

Overall though, the build and ideas are solid and probably still the best way to play elementalist in this meta. I still feel ele is a very strong team support fighter even without cele + DS changes, but it certainly has to be played carefully and with more thought now both in regards to style and build selection. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

With class stacking rules in place, tempest seems like a solid contender for the 5th slot on a team comp.

Glenstorm.4059:

What new roles do you think have opened up for Eles, OP?

S/F Shatterstone-focused DPS, obviously. Duh.