Guild Wars 2

1: Get schwiftyyy
2: Oooogerrrrkill
3: Stop. Hammer time!
4: Iron Chef

Yeah.. lots of people crowded around bank and TP vendors, or running to LA portal.. They made it an appealing place for the PvE crowd, the actual number of people queueing sPvP is abysmal.

Valkyriez.6578:

I remember watching your vids when mplayed 2 years ago, they were really good. When did you stop doing them if I may ask? There’s nothing really out there that covers builds like you used to.

It was probably years ago now that I think of it. I made an effort to purge videos from the channel once they became outdated, so I can’t really even find them to look up the dates anymore. Thanks for the comment though, it was fun while it lasted!

I used to do this youtube bit where I’d post guide videos for builds with top players/streamers, so I’ve pretty much tried every prevalent sPvP build the NA side of this game has seen. Here’s my picks:

Worst:

• d/d backstab thief (early on, 0 counter play -you’d just run around instagibbing ppl out of stealth).
• s/d evade spam thief (really spammy and annoying to play against, playing it felt very bland compared to other classes -there just wasn’t as much decision making going on)
• d/d cantrip ele (pretty much plagued the NA meta for the first year or two).
• HGH engi (roll your face across the keyboard and get rewarded with 25 stacks of might).
• Signet Warrior (passive sustain was broken, you could just kite around for a few seconds if you got low and be close to full hp again)
• Bunker chonomancer (current meta. Yeah let’s give mesmers the boonsharing of a bunker guard, the invulnerability uptime of an s/d thief, the CC of a terrormancer, and 66% cooldown reduction for them and their party. What could go wrong?)
• Turret Engineer (did anyone like this?)
• Spirit ranger
• MM necro
• BM ranger (not because pet micro, but because evade spam = no fun for anyone).

Best:

• D/D khalifa necro (A really fun power necro build that wasn’t built around just spamming shroud 1 or wells)
• GS shatter mesmer (it’s a classic)
• Trap ranger (with torch)
• Skull crack warrior (mace/shield + GS)
• 3 kit engi
• old school bunker guard
• d/d ele (who am I kidding. it was a fun playstyle, broken, but mechanically fun).
• s/d fresh air ele
• d/p thief (flawed, but probably the closest Thief has come to a mechanically balanced build & moderately fun to play).
• Terror/condi necro (another classic)
• Zerker staff ele (manmode)
• Condi mesmer (this is my guilty pleasure. It’s not a fun build to play against, but I could never get enough of it. I just loved seeing that constant stream of clones kamikaze their way into my enemies -and watching the other team trying to figure out where the hell I am lol)

StickerHappy.8052:

Zodian.6597:

Step 1: Log onto a mesmer.
Step 2: Spec into this build (null field vs necros)
Step 3: Play an unranked game or two to master this playstyle, then jump into ranked & try to get the Forest of Niflhel map.
Step 4: Does enemy team have a mesmer?

• Yes: instruct your team to focus their mesmer above everything.
• No: automatically win.

Step 5: Does your team have a Thief and/or Warrior?

• Yes: Politely ask them to swap to a PvP class.
• No, but enemy team does: automatically win.
• Yes, but enemy team does too: see step 4.

Step 6: Sit at mid. Rotate home if necessary. Avoid far as much as possible.

You must play in a low MMR division I am guessing because you can’t win with this one.

Title of post?

Step 1: Log onto a mesmer.
Step 2: Spec into this build (null field vs necros)
Step 3: Play an unranked game or two to master this playstyle, then jump into ranked & try to get the Forest of Niflhel map.
Step 4: Does enemy team have a mesmer?

• Yes: instruct your team to focus their mesmer above everything.
• No: automatically win.

Step 5: Does your team have a Thief and/or Warrior?

• Yes: Politely ask them to swap to a PvP class.
• No, but enemy team does: automatically win.
• Yes, but enemy team does too: see step 4.

Step 6: Sit at mid. Rotate home if necessary. Avoid far as much as possible.

At the very least, they need to change burning back. I’m all for giving people a few weeks to find anti burst meta builds, but there is no way to play around stacked burning. There aren’t enough condi clears in the world to deal with it right now. Team fights are pretty much determined by how many people on your team have access to aoe burning. It shouldn’t be possible to dish out that much damage on the entire enemy team. It’s breaking the game.

Liam McColgan.7689:

i disagree. I’ve been playing ranked condition shatter, and 90% of the time winning, and very comfortably at that. And this is playing against ESL players, not hotjoiners.

However, its because condition shatter is totally different to the other condition builds out there, which rely on stacking and sustain.

The beauty of condition shatter right now is the ability to stack on avrage 15+ confusion and 15-20 torment in a matter of seconds. Now this kind of condi bombing is on par with the power burst, honestly. I can literally 100%-0 in 5 seconds if i get the stacks up. Torment ticks for 4k+ alone, with 15-20 stacks.

I kill npcs faster than power.

So, please do NOT nerf MtD or torment in general ANET. It’s early days but i firmly believe condition shatter will have a place in this meta purely because it goes against the concept of other condi builds (being bunkerish, sustain, cc, covering condis with bait ones etc).

Condition shatter; you can, stack 2x torment, 2x confusion, blind, stun/daze, boon strip, slow, increase cd on interrupted skills with ONE shatter…..craaazzzzzy.

Also the Gm scepter trait is sick (Malicious Sorcery) , <3 anet for it. 15% inc speed on scepter skills, so it no longer feels lik a slow sluggish weapon now. Also, the 20% reduction making scepter block +5 torment stacks on a 6 ’ SIX!!!!’ second cd….so good.

I’m gonna keep theory crafting but the only hard counter i can see right now are diamond skin eles and thats only in a 1v1 situation. Everything else, assuming you have a good skill level with shatter (including thieves :p) simply cannot handle the condi spikes.

I’m even getting hate w/ because they think im PU (im not) or people generally saying “omg is this the new mesmers now, its aids” etc etc.

For anyone interested, this is the build im using: If you know how to play shatter or pre patch condi shatter….have fun!

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-R3lZ;1VPVz047cVF71;9;4STW;0038138258;4V3X6U;1j2;42y

Yeah I was running something similar, but took chaos over domination. How are you liking the new vuln? I ran into the same wall with diamond skin eles a few hours after patch and went back to shatter. Luckily, it looks like less and less of them are taking diamond skin now.

It feels like we’ve got this “burst or be bursted” mentality. I’d say about 80% of the builds I queued into tonight were ‘assassins’ with high burst + mobility or stealth (mesmer, theif, medi guard), the remaining 20% were cele builds (ele, engi, warrior) with access to high hybrid burst via stacked burning + direct dmg skills. I tried condition/power variants on most of the classes and the power builds almost always felt noticeably stronger. Mesmer is probably the fastest class right now, with thief and medi guard close behind, then the cele builds are just there due to the fact that burning is completely broken (if you have 3 of them in a team fight you just win). Has anyone found a decent condi build that can keep up? The best I could come up with was condi mesmer, and it still preformed worse than shatter and interrupt. And I’m talking rabid or carrion amulet builds, cele does not = a pure condi build.

So, I just found runes of balthazar. I’m now able to reach 20+ ticks burning with that + the burn duration sigil.

Supreme.3164:

Zodian.6597:

yeah I just did a full burn s/f condi ele build. It’s really funny vs anything but ele (diamond skin seems like the norm now). Basically just prep with earth 2, then drop all fire skills and reactivate earth 2 through fire field, + signet of fire and it’s like 12 stacks of burning. You can take glyph of elemental power and just auto attack in fire with scepter for 6k burning stack per auto attacks lol

So you just auto-attack in fire ..and win…a clear indication of the opponents you’re facing, no pun intended, also you take 30k dmg in 5s? how much HP have you got?

Yeah was on necro so life force. Heal was on cd, he knocked me down, applied 7 stacks, I went DS and he applied the rest -once he hit around 13 stacks my hp just melted before I could realize what was goning on. I thought a thief had came in and nuked me, but checked death recap and at top was burning: 37k lol.

And yeah I’m testing build in normals right now, but I mean all I have to do is land like 3 auto attacks to force a cleanse. I can just sit out of range and melt down classes that don’t have sustained condi cleanse. And I have all the utility of focus, so I’ll usually drop some CC and projectile deflection down for lolz

yeah I just did a full burn s/f condi ele build. It’s really funny vs anything but ele (diamond skin seems like the norm now). Basically just prep with earth 2, then drop all fire skills and reactivate earth 2 through fire field, + signet of fire and it’s like 12 stacks of burning. You can take glyph of elemental power and just auto attack in fire with scepter for 6k burning stack per auto attacks lol

Just 1v1d an ele, took 30k burn damage in a fight that lasted about 5 seconds. GG stacked burning.

This is a suggestion for the Guild Hall feature coming in HoT
I think it might give the space an added sense of community if the characters of random offline guild members (instead of NPC’s) appeared to walk around, chill in the tavern, ect… obviously there would be a limit to the number of them (some guilds have hundreds of ppl offline all the time).

Here’s a rundown of how this would look:

• The characters of random offline guild members appear in Guild Hall as NPC’s, walking around and chilling in the tavern.
• Online players (who see the “NPC” guildies) can interact with them to thumbs up their look, inspect armor skins, leave them notes (re-skin the mail UI).
• Player with most compliments on their look at the end of the month unlocks a title and has their portrait displayed in the guild tavern for the following month (default character portrait, can be replaced with screen shot by winning character).

Thief needs a rework. The concept of initiative is interesting in theory, but kind of destroys the rhythm of combat in practice. The least they could do is give infiltrators arrow a 15s CD and make it cost 3 initiative instead of 6.

Should just make a sort by MMR tab, and add class filter. Even if rewards are tied to games played over MMR, at least ranked would be competitive.

They need to change the way a displayed MMR would work. A small queue size makes MMR too volatile, so the weight of a loss or a win vs huge MMR spreads during low queue time should be nerfed. Eg; if a 2200 player keeps queuing into 1200 players at 3am and looses, this shouldn’t tank his MMR -and it shouldn’t boost the 1200 players MMR. When population is too low to provide an ideal match, the system should acknowledge any match it can come up with as equal, and adjust MMR as if everyone in the match were facing their own MMR, then divide any gain/loss in rating by 2.

To fix MMR volatility, you have to set up conditionals in your algorithm to deal with what’s making it volatile.

shadaux.5192:

I can blame them… But that’s not what I’m doing here I’m blaming metabattle for handing them builds on a plate. At least before they had to do some digging and then end up with old or competing versions of the same build to weigh up for themselves. Metabattle is “play this its better” and now a dev is “helping” a new player by essentially saying “don’t even try do things ur own way here have this and you never have to think for yourself again”

I think your perception of builds is meant for PvE, not PvP. Gw2 sPvP is all about equal opportunity and low barrier of entry, someone coming from PvE shouldn’t have to spend years getting destroyed by players with decent PvP builds in order to learn how to build for sPvP. The builds on metabattle are like general templates, unoptamized for personal playstyle, but they give newbies a really good place to start from in sPvP (and introduce playstyles that are actually relevant, eg; learn these d/p thief rotations rather than wasting time figuring out p/d sucks).

Welcome to PvP, here’s how you win those matchups as thief.

Guardian: the skill you get from stealing them is a daze, save it to interrupt, steal their boons. If you ware playing s/d you can basically just spam 3, if playing d/p it kind of depends on their spec. If they are playing medi guard (they are hitting you with scepter) and you are playing d/p -you’re gonna have a hard time, just spam blinds as much as you can and get ready to evade when you see a big blue shield surround them. Vs bunker as d/p, switch to shortbow and widdle them down patiently with poison and auto attack until they blow their heal, then swap to d/p and backstab them, use the skill you stole to start a daze lock, then auto attack x2 – pistol 4 on repeat until you run out of initiative or they die. The key to killing a bunker guard is maintaining pressure, if you give them any room to breath they will reset.

Warrior: Open by precasting pistol 5 into steal then whirlwind in the smoke field on top of them. The key to beating warriors as thief is keeping them blinded and staying on top of them with d/p 3. Shadowstep out of the fight if you see them pop berserkers stance (it will make them immune to blinds). This is generally an easy matchup, just be sure to auto attack and keep poison on them (their passive heal is strong). Thief is kind of made to deal with warrior.

Ranger: LB ranger is built to exterminate other zerkers, if they see you before you see them it’s going to be a bad time. Your job as a thief is to pressure the hell out of this guy, you’re the only one that will be able to deal with his kite. Always watch for him in fights and stay on top of him with d/p 3 (interrupt his heal with headshot). An LB ranger in GS is essentially just a subpar warrior to his team, so keep him in melee.

Other than that, like everyone else said; check out metabattle. They have some good stuff on there.

I’m assuming this means conditionals looking at level of interaction between mail sender and recipient. eg;

if(gold in mail >=100g){
if(the 2 have never communicated before){
intercept mail;
}
else if(2 have interacted, but never been friends or guildies or partied together){
intercept mail;
}
}
//of course it is probably much more layered than that, but this must be the basic idea.

The problem with this is, it won’t take an RMT long before it narrows down the exact limits of your conditionals and develop a strategy to work around them (keep in mind these people have nearly limitless access to gold and accounts to preform trial and error with). Meanwhile, people that are selling stuff in trade or donating gold to a charity stream will have their messages deleted. Systems like this always categorizes the most honest players in with the most malicious. There is no way to effectively combat one without hurting the other.

I’m currently a pre CS major (finishing up 2nd year) in university and I’m pretty fluent with Java and Python, but haven’t done much outside of data structures as far as actual programming goes. I want to start making some tools using the GW2 api, but I’m not entirely sure where to start. Are there any guides for getting into this? Is it as simple as just downloading the library I want then importing it in a class and calling get methods on the object fields?

Siphaed.9235:

Except not. Those are the kind of demographic that worries more about statistics, numbers, and turning an experience within a virtual game world into a graph. They are not the RPers that care about having a mini pet, a new dye, a new outfit, or anything of that nature. Nope. That demographic you’re speaking of are the kind that would plague the game’s group content with messages of “your damage sucks noob!” as they kick players from dungeons after the first boss thanks to their ‘very epic DPS meter’. Player developed gear score add-ons would be a matter of a months from that, judging others based solely on numbers.

It is basically opening the floodgates to all the evils that come with add-ons. And sorry to say, but those evils far outweigh any benefits that come with it. A.Net knows as much, which is why they’ve left the add-ons locked for so long in their minimalist-UI game.

I think comparing the gearscore/dps trackers of WoW and assuming they would work the same way in gw2 is a bit of an exaggeration. Gw2 doesn’t have a gear treadmill, it’s very easy to obtain full exotics in just a few days, and while ascended might take a bit longer; it’s definitely obtainable. The problem with gearscore in WoW was that it was always going up. Gw2 has had 1 gear tier added in the past 3 years. Without a treadmill, gearscore becomes a lot less toxic.

Dps trackers would probably be the bigger problem, because dps is very dependent on character build, and we have no holy trinity; you could argue that it would ice some builds out of the PvE meta. I think the only argument I could make for DPS meter is that it would give a competitive metric to a game mode that has been sort of lacking in progression/endgame value.

And this demographic you’re talking about, the ones that use graphs and spreadsheets and turn the game into a giant pile of statistical analysis; they are already here. We’ve been using crafting efficiency algorithms, trading algorithms for the TP with trend graphs, spreadsheets for build efficiency in sPvP, various graphs to replace the always unpopular gw2 ladderboard, farming rout guides/maps, I could go on forever. The only difference is that these tools have been built into websites you have to alt tab to use. Letting people play the game the way they want to isn’t always a bad thing..

Dawdler.8521:

… Why?

Just get a laptop cooling pad to place it on, limit ingame fps to 60 (keeps the GPU running alot cooler) and use an external keyboard, mouse and screen. It cant be any worse than that horrid desktop people are suggesting.

As long as your laptop isnt a HP, Dell or Lenovo its no problem (HP in particular, I dont think they know how heat transfer physics even works). If it is, I understand your desire for a desktop.

This. I have a pretty expensive gaming laptop, more powerful than razer blade pro, just as thin, and it get hot as kitten. You pretty much have to play over a cooling pad with these new slim ultrabooks. I have a desktop with an i5 and an hd7850 2gb, but this laptop blows it out of the water. Cooling pads run about $20, and most of them do the trick.

Healix.5819:

Zodian.6597:

Then I was like “Wait, why are they using a 3rd party software to do this?”

There’s a big difference between real addons and overlays. Resize your browser window, set it to top most and drag it over GW2’s window. That’s an overlay. It’s simple and has no interaction with the client itself. It’s completely separated.

Overwolf is not needed to create overlays, it’s simply a tool. Far more advanced overlays can be created by making actual applications, but you can’t trust random executables, whereas Overwolf is nothing more that a browser/desktop gadget. A real application however has far more possibilities and can interact with the game client, such as reading memory (against the rules), making overlays like DPS meters possible.

Yeah, but the developer can control what variables in memory are accessible to the application. As well as how the application can interact with those variables.

Zaklex.6308:

You do realize that ArenaNet has a marketing agreement with Overwolf, don’t you? That’s the big reason they went this route.

Obviously. Anet just doesn’t gain much from the arrangement. If they wanted to show support for creative app development, they could have just cut out the middle man and had their own webpage or (like I said) addon contest. Tbh no one wants to dl bloatware and run a gadget every time they play. Overlay is really only justifiable if you’re super into WvW and too lazy to hit the map button.

Vayne.8563:

There are many people who had mods though. It’s not like if you start a mod thread you won’t find a lot of resistance. You make it sound like mods are the best thing since sliced bread. At best mods are a mixed bag that cause considerable problems in games.

Also allowing in game mods very often leads to better ways to bot.

mods/addons are an outlet for users to create the modular features that should be in the game, but were never added due to resource constraints and deadlines. I think in our case, at the very best, we’d have build templates, boss timers, an LFG tool, and a popper tutorial within 3 months of this game’s launch (if it shipped with addons support). I know we’d have these things because we built all of them into external community websites that worked and saw huge traffic. You can argue botting all day, but bots don’t scare off players nearly as fast as a lack of features/content does. And we know Anet already seems to have the tools and resources available to deal with bots, but they don’t have the resources to deal with the demand of modular features that this game sees when a significant amount of people are actually playing it.

Behellagh.1468:

Mods access the client, API accesses the ANet database servers via the web. You really don’t want people mucking with your client.

I think you’re getting confused. I’m saying there should be a folder within the gw2 game folder that they can add apps built off api values to and a way to activate those “apps” in game without the need for a 3rd party overlay software. Nobody is messing with the game server values. But there should also be a way to get character specific information from the local game folder (eg; chat logs, trait choice file, ect…) to utilize within addons.

Example; Soul Reaping V, VII, XI trait line gets written to a text file as “5 5 7 11” because it is the 5th line in Necro traits, then takes 5, 7, 11. You could simply have a text file called CurrentBuild.txt within the game folder that determines trait line choice and an addon could snapshot the values of this text file when the user clicks a “Save Build” button, then they’d be prompted to name the build, which would actually create and name a whole new text file stored locally within the addon folder. When they want to reactivate the build, just copy/paste the text file as CurrentBuild.txt and overwrite the old one in the game folder.
Friends could do a “share build” button, which would just upload the text file from their addon folder to the other players.

I really like it. The salvage tab can be a bit misleading due to RNG. It would be really handy to have a range filter for rarity and demand/supply (units) added to this tab. Otherwise, you’re just gonna have a bunch of ppl buying exotics and salvaging them for logs and loosing net profit lol. Also as a design tip, if you added a buy/sell switch above the price columns so we could switch between the order price and instant price, that might be more intuitive. Cheers!

Requesting a mod to move this post to the api forums. Thanks

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Perhaps, this would be better suited in the API sub-forum, where those Devs concerned with this subject read and post more often.

Good luck.

I think this post extends the boundaries of that sub-forum. The api subforum is pretty stagnant anyways.

Here’s the thing. They are actually doing a kitten good job hyping up HoT (if they can keep the momentum going then it will be a successful launch). The problem with that is the major demographics of ppl getting hyped that are actually going to buy this game. 50% of them are going to be coming from other MMOs that have small features GW2 doesn’t have, and the other 50% are old Gw2 players that left because Gw2 lacked features they wanted.

When HoT releases, there will be a spike in new players across the board. And the forums are going to be lit up with suggestions and questions and complaints from players new and old asking why x feature was never added. What Anet needs to come to terms with is their speed. At the end of the day; they are a corporation. This makes them incredibly slow with reactionary development. There is no way in hell that Anet is going to be fast enough to retain the majority of these players.

Supporting addons should be seen as an investment in development time and player retention. Subletting the smaller stuff to addon creators puts the responsibility of answering this inevitable maelstrom of complaints into the hands of people who are actually capable of responding to them quickly (without being held to the standard of AAA development and corporate structure). I don’t think addons will retain all players, but it could keep a huge chunk of them. And people that are willing to modify/customize their gaming experience might just be the ones most likely to spend money on a cash shop that allows for modification and customization of their characters. This is a lucrative player demographic, no matter how big or small it ends up being.

Monster thread
So today I noticed the Overwolf App challenge submission deadline has officially closed, I’d honestly never taken a serious look at this thing until last night. When the contest was originally announced, I assumed it was a competition to make mobile apps that took advantage of the Gw2 api libraries in ways that could keep players connected to tyria via their smartphones. Cool. What I now realize is it’s basically just an in game graphics overlay program, and the majority of these “apps” are just photoshop overlays of the wvw map and scoreboard that update in real time according to the api.

Now, my initial reaction to this was “oh that’s kinda cool, I thought addons were frowned upon in gw2.” Then I was like “Wait, why are they using a 3rd party software to do this?” Using an overlay program just seem like a stupid and clunky workaround to not having addon support in your game, and pitting people against each other to make these fake* addons is really confusing to me. As a developer, why wouldn’t you just allow creators to throw these overlays into the client game folder directly? Having to load up a 3rd party app every time you play is a waste of the player’s time. The idea doesn’t even work as a marketing effort. I guess I could understand if some 3rd party company paid you a bunch of money to promote their software in your game, but you still must realize how cheesy this all looks at face value. People don’t see Anet promoting innovation and creativity, they see Anet leaning on some small 3rd party bloatware to provide a feature they should be able to implement themselves.

The potential
I can think of like 20 feature complaints/requests (improved death recap ui, party damage trackers, build templates, various ui improvements, ect..) that could have all been solved with simple addons in some way. Can’t you simply limit the access of modders? Like just giving access to just the string data of combat chat and the skill api library would solve death recap customization and let PvE heros use damage leaderboards to quantify/add a competitive element to dungeon run efficiency. Giving access to trait choice data would solve build templates (eg; parse through selected traits and store which traits are selected on client memory, then when they wanna re-apply that build, parse back through the stored trait choices and re-apply them, throw it into a ui that minimizes to an icon by the map and you’ve got build templates).

The opposition
So what’s the problem? With the FOV update behind us, what sort of advantages would addons give? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is maybe a window that displayed enemy cooldowns based on combat text (like when when you target someone, grab their name and parse through last 4 minutes of combat text and get the timestamps for when they used their skills and show me an approximation of their current skillbar), but even that would only be accurate for skills that do damage to the character, it wouldn’t track defensive cooldowns or things like lich form/portal (actual important skills).

We should also remember that people have been “modding” this game explicitly since release. You can still find speed/teleport hacks, wall hacks, anti gravity, botting engines if you know where to look. Setting up addons and re-evaluating what the client has access to would filter out a lot of these malicious tools.

TLDR: you’re throwing a competition to basically make addons then not supporting actual addons, why? Is there still an argument for addons giving unfair advantages over other players in combat? if so, what is it?

Leeto.1570:

And death shroud is same reason we will always be forced to play with staff in PVP, no other weapon lets you generate life force before engaging. If something like this change would happen it would open so many new builds for PVP necros and maybe even my dream of playing greatsword + dagger/dagger necro could happen.

you play staff because having an instant AOE condi transfer + fear is OP as hell. I agree with the DS changes, even having it regen/degen to like 20% out of combat would make the class a lot faster and funner to play.

I’d like to remind everyone that this is not a balance thread. Remove all numbers and stats, what class has the funnest core mechanics to play as/against?

For people that have played/mained multiple (or all) classes, what do you feel is the best (and/or worst) designed class (skill mechanics/ect..) and why?

I’ve been pretty multi class from the start, and for me it’s:
necro > mesmer > ranger > ele, engi > guardian > thief
I think I have the majority of my games played on thief, and the least on engi.

the good

• Necro: Death shroud is probably the single most brilliant class mechanic design in the entire game. It’s an ability that can be used defensively (sit in it) and offensively (pop in, use skills fast, pop out), countered by passive play (bar diminishes over time) or aggressive play (chunk through the bar + cc). Necro has the kit to make both power and condi builds work, and the skill cap to make them work even when the class is pushed outside the meta.
• Mesmer: Again, the shatter mechanic is a good balance of pros vs cons in using a skill (trade your clones/anonymity for a powerful skill, and the power of that skill scales with what you gave up). Mesmer has the versatility to answer anything, but the balance to make answering more than one thing at a time extremely difficult. It is arguably the highest skill cap in PvP and probably the funnest to watch skilled people play.
• Ranger: While passive mechanics are usually pretty bad game design, the ranger pet is a good example of what a passive mechanic should be. Left alone, it’s a small damage increase that quickly dies to AoE, but when played actively it can be an extremely effective/versatile tool. I think ranger wep skills could use some improvements, I disagree with casting evade to any wep skill, but if Druid sees some collaboration with the Necro design team, that could solve a lot of those problems.

the bad

• Thief: I mained thief upon release thinking it’d be a class with burst that had to be set up skillfully over a long fight and only executed as a sort of combo finisher. Nope. The initiative resource mechanic promotes spamming the same skill on repeat, and most thief builds that have come out of the woodwork over the past 3 years have incorporated that sort of play style. Gw2 Thief is equivalent to that character your brother always played in that fighting game you had growing up. You know, the one that spams the same skill and locks your character into a cc chain for 3 rounds straight. Thief is the epitome of bad game design. It’s boring to watch, encourages little (to often no) counter play, and is typically pretty boring to play long term (due to a fairly low skill floor and cap compared to other classes). The class was designed to break newer players into PvP, but it essentially let newer players dominate/plague the game modes designed to break other newer players into PvP for a large portion of GW2’s history.

Arthas (Lich King) form WoW
and
Eddie Murphy from his 1983 stand up tour “Delirious”

Heavily depends on the build/class you’re playing too. You will rank up faster (and go through reward tracks faster) playing lb ranger or staff ele, where you can tag every kill that occurs and get 300 part points and top player each game. It used to be much harder to rank up. I stopped playing back before they nerfed it and I was like rank 40 with around 2.5k games played, now I think I’m like rank 65 or something with around 3k played. You can get it in about a month of spamming unranked/ranked 40+ hours a week with a couple friends and playing LB ranger. It isn’t much of an accomplishment anymore though, a lot of ppl abused an exploit on skyhammer awhile back (everyone aoe’s eachother then jumps off cliff over and over again for mass glory farming) that basically allowed you to get it in like a day, so a lot of ppl have it now.

PowerBottom.5796:

I don’t see why I would really argue against it, but is it really necessary? After roughly 2 months I’ve been playing PvP again, I have enough tomes to level 8 Chars to 80 (If you take into account the free first 20 levels from the birthday-gift). ^^’

And with the gear I get from PvP, it’s really no prob to do dungeons and with a few laurels left over for ascended accessories and stuff, you can even go fractals right away.

But I guess for ppl that want to go through the story from lvl1-80, it would be useful. Show those scrubs your PvP e-kitten! ^^’

For me, it’s more about getting world completion more efficiently and having the option to go through the game on an alt and level up the old fashion way experiencing things like personal story, but at a less sluggish pace (PvP playerbase is a hyperactive community after all). The PvE players have had tons of incentives added to bring them over to PvP, but there hasn’t been much added to give the PvP players a reason to cross over into PvE and actually play through the content. Creating a cohesive playerbase is a two way street, it’s not enough to just assimilate the PvE players. By creating incentives in both directions, PvE players might actually stick around long enough to fall in love with PvP, rather than just seeing it as a way to farm dailies.

And yeah we’ve got tomes, I’ve got a little over a hundred in my bank right now, but tomes are a finite resource, and one that can easily be extinguished after leveling 1 or 2 characters to cap. Having a leveling gear set would feel like a more permanent and reliable option for leveling alts.

Thief:
-Remove initiative, each time a skill is used more than 2 times in a row, scale thief’s health pool down by 25% for being a cheap piece of kitten.

-Steal rework: reduce CD to 0 seconds. New functionality: while in combat, steals the weapon skills of target and assigns them to the thief’s bar in sequential order (steal on target a = thief 2 becomes target a’s 2, steal on target b = thief 3 becomes target b’s 2, steal on target b again = thief 4 becomes target b’s 3, steal on target a again = thief 5 becomes target a’s 3). With a rolling replace functionality on the 5 skill (stealing again while bar is full of stolen skills replaces thief 5 skill, cooldowns are bound to the thief). Save these skills upon weapon swap, so you can have 2 full bars of stolen skills and swap between them.
Out of combat: “Steal” becomes “Stealth”: enter stealth while out of combat (no duration). Remove all other ways of getting into stealth except utilities, make them static stealth (no duration). Nerf everything else about those skills.
-Add an f2 that throws away the last stolen skill.

Stats scale dynamically to exotic @ level requirement of the character level wearing the gear, gear levels up with the character. So I start at lvl 1 character with exotic lvl 1 gear, and wear the same gear all the way to 80, which ends at lvl 80 exotic gear.

This way PvP players could blow through the less intriguing lower level PvE content without having to deal with changing up gear/skins all the time (which for me is the largest turnoff of participating in PvE – I’ve played this game since Beta, I’m not going to parade around looking like a scrub killing mobs when I could be parading around like a bad@ss killing other players). It would also make the Glorious reward track feel more rewarding, like we’re building something permanent and valuable to our account, rather than just picking up the 3 skins from each set that look good and never touching it again.

We’re PvP players, we have like a billion skins and many of us have played dress up enough across all of our alts over the past 3 years to the point of where we feel satisfied with their looks. Give us more goals to work towards, we want to participate in other parts of the game, we just don’t want to have all of our PvP play time mean nothing once we step outside the mists. We are talking about the most skilled/hardcore player demographic, its relative character power outside of the mists should reflect that pragmatism.

Here are my suggestions for a unique “PvP rune” set bonus to go with the Glorious armor set:
1 piece: +20% experience from kills.
2 piece: +20% experience from kills, gain experience (based on level) when successfully dodging an attack (60s cd).
3 piece: +20% experience from kills, +5% experience from dynamic events.
4 piece: +20% experience from kills, + 5% experience from crafting.
5 piece: +20% experience from kills, +25% movement speed.
6 piece: +(0.5*char level) to all stats, gain experience for completing PvP matches (based on points earned, multiplied by character level).

Thoughts?

I’ve been playing terror mancer with signet of spite and corrupt boon, it actually destroys this meta because of how many classes rely on boon stacking right now. You really only have a hard time against good warriors that are running zerker stance (since they will be immune to your condition application while it’s up) and LB rangers that sit on ledges (necro has no ports to really deal with the kite). But other than that, guard, ele, engi; you just wait for a full bar of boons, corrupt boon them into conditions (which they will cleanse), then signet of spite once their cleanse is down and cc lock them to death. PoC kitten s ele and guard too. It’s a complete counter to most cele biulds (since these builds typically depend on might stacking for damage).
vs turret engi, you don’t really even have to go in. You can just LoS their turrets off point and spam signet of spite + corrupt boon with your wep skills off cd to stack literally every condition in the game on them (they have 0 condi clears). Staff fear + PoC in, ds fear, ds 5 for torment, toss their immobs back onto them with staff cleanse or dagger 4. It’s a pretty easy matchup.

Counter meta terror build

Eurantien.4632:

As long as the thief calls his refuge and his black powder I can often use it to reset the fight with the thief (standing in refuge or swooping through black powder). Moreover, once stealthed in a situation like that we can use my pet to lock down a target (using canines) and then burst together. It’s actually REALLY nice in 2 v 2s to be paired with a thief imo because both the ranger and the thief can kite and wait for the opportunities they need.

+ With great coordination you can do healing spring + cluster bombs to reset or just be more selfish and use troll but have SoR for condi clear for the thief (as well as yourself).

I totally forgot ranger GS had the leap finisher casted to it. And it’s what like 10s cd? That’s a lot of stealth opportunities if well cordinated. You could peal simply by precasting black powder into a shadowstep and letting the ranger jump through the field and run away in stealth. I guess there’s a lot of synergy finisher/field wise, it just might be pretty hard to set up consistently in a real game.

Kount.5704:

Hey,

Since you seem to know quite a bit about the subject, can I ask you another question?

When should you use a finisher on the opponent? Should it always be a priority or is it more of a “only do it when it’s easy to do”(no enemies around) kind of thing?

Thanks!

As a thief, you can get away with stomping in a lot of situations other classes can’t by either going stealth, dropping a black powder on the downed body, or exploiting shadowstep. The class you’ll really need to drop black powder for is guardian, since their aoe knockback doesn’t require a target. If you’re in a teamfight against a comp with limited aoe dps, use blackpowder -> heartseaker combo on top of the body to blind enemy teammates and stealth stomp. If you’re trying to stomp on a team with lots of Aoe (see hammer warrior); start the stomp, then shadowstep out of the fight while channeling the animation, stepping back in to complete the stomp.

Never stomp an ele, thief, or mesmer in a team fight unless they are being rezed in an x Vs. 2 situation (sometimes you can get the thief if you’re quick with shadowstep, but aoe will usually burst their body down anyways); these classes will always just port away. Always stomp warriors, rangers, turret engis, and (minion mancer) necros because these classes have the easiest time getting back up with self rez or rally if left unchecked for more than like 10 seconds. If you see enemy team rezzing, you can use pistol 4 to interrupt their rez, and sb 4 + cluster bomb spam to slow it down significantly.

For other classes, stomping is largely dependent on stablility. When you stomp in a teamfight, everyone is going to try and interupt you. Since you can stealth, this counters like 1/2 the main CC skills in the game, only leaving you vulnerable to higher CD aoe interrupts like mesmer’s GS 5 and necro’s staff fear. Hammer warriors can have a lot of aoe CC, though, which is why you must use shadow step if a hammer warrior is present. In higher MMR, rangers will use their pet’s to CC you while they are downed. Ranger has the most devastating downed state in the game if played correctly, with 4 CC skills and a self rez via pet. Shadow step away to dodge the wolf fear if you’re playing against a decent ranger.

tldr;
don’t stomp in teamfight: thief, ele, mesmer.
MUST stomp in teamfight: ranger, warrior, mm necro, turret engi. Drop black powder, heartseeker through it and stomp.
If outside teamfight: drop black powder on body works for everything but ranger. You might want to stealth stomp thief, ele, mesmer to save time.
Vs hammer warrior in teamfight: shadow step away while your stomp is channeling then step back in to complete it and avoid aoe dmg/cc interrupts.

BlackTruth.6813:

Zodian.6597:

Thief hard counters warrior. The only problem you’re going to run into is condi teams, medi guards, cele engineers, and of course other thieves and rangers that can burst you down first. This roaming combo counters out warriors, else, mesmers, and Necros.
If you see 2+ guardians, have the ranger swap to a condition build or something. And maybe you swap to s/d. Medi guard is the real terror for a comp with zerker ranger and thief

No Thief doesn’t hard counter Warrior. Have you ever fought a shoutbow without screwing up on Thief? It’s annoying as hell. If it was a hard counter Thief would have a favorable match up with against ALL builds but it doesn’t do that well vs. shoutbow by itself. If you’re saying this from a 2v1 gank perspective, that just means Thief is good at plussing for when it counts.

You’re probably talking about a different build, but it’s not hard to kill most Thieves on that easy shoutbow build.

Yeah, I guess shoutbow at higher mmr can be a hard matchup for d/p thief. But he said he just started playing, so he’s probably going to be more commonly in matchups where he can just steal into a black powder and win vs warrior. Personally, I don’t even see many ppl running shouts outside of tryhards in team queue because of how boring it is. And I fell like with thief you should still be able to win in this matchup by simply blind spamming the final thrusts and ripping might stacks with steal it’s just a long fight.

If you want something that synergizes better with ranger, try power necro. You guys will have mad aoe pressure for team fights and you can peal for her better with fears and immobs. Play it with barbarians amulet for a few games to get the hang of it, then swap to zerkers once you’re comfortable.

Here’s how team fights should go; you run in, pop death shroud 5, fear the most bursty person targeting you or her, after the immob kicks in she drops lb5 and you drop your wells on everyone. Have her use entangle to keep everyone locked in your wells for full duration while you pop lich and kill them (they won’t be able to dodge). At this point, she should start pealing for you with lb 4, pet cc skills, gs 5 and 4. Immediately pop death shroud out of lich and spam 1 on the target with the lowest health, throw in a fear to keep them from healing while you finish them off. If you are low, save the last bit of life force to run away to safety and heal up. If either of you gets immobilized, be sure to cleanse it with staff 4.

Thief hard counters warrior. The only problem you’re going to run into is condi teams, medi guards, cele engineers, and of course other thieves and rangers that can burst you down first. This roaming combo counters out warriors, ele, mesmers, and Necros.
If you see 2+ guardians, have the ranger swap to a condition build or something. And maybe you swap to s/d. Medi guard is the real terror for a comp with zerker ranger and thief

So did we shift game design philosophies in the PvP department at anet? This current leader board is literally a treadmill. It punishes people for not playing 24/7 in the same way WoW does with dailies and raiding. If we are transitioning back into the old WoW ways of psychological exploitative game design, could we at least have unique skin vendors only accessible to top 1000 on the board? Not only would it give a dopamine boost to the people already playing 24/7 (which will keep them playing, and eventually addicted), it also might provide some incentive for more people to jump on the treadmill and actually buff queue times for the rest of us.

In all seriousness though; this is wrong. And I’m pretty sure I know that you guys on the PvP design team know that this is wrong too.

Lexiceta.4156:

I am not arguing players near the top are good players i am saying the current system is hiding good players at low MMRs because the current system doesn’t promote winning or MMR

Oh. Yeah, no I totally agree with that. Plus, I’m pretty sure you can just tank your MMR by day, then win farm by night and totally exploit it. This is nothing more than a ranked points treadmill, let’s be honest.

google.3709:

NO! STOP!

Dedication should be rewarded Equally if not greater than winning! If i play 50 games daily on my turret engineer , why should someone who plays less game than me be higher on the ladder boards!

Ladder boards should reflect who works the hardest, NOT WHOEVER FINDS 4 FRIENDS AND FARM SoloQ Players!

lmao

The UI should be more of a ranking, with the player that did the most damage to you being listed at the top, and a dropdown list of all the damage they did to you in the order that it happened (their last skill used on you listed at the top), followed by a list for the next player. You should be able to view this information somewhere in the scoreboard when you revive too (I always feel like I rez before I have time to gather anything useful from the death breakdown log). Also, kill count should only be given to the player with most damage on target and the player who got the stomp.

Lexiceta.4156:

Chess is a ELO system although similar not the same and MMR is for exactly what it stands for Match Making Rating not measure of skill but a measure of similar skill not a score of skill. My point wasn’t that is was the MMR is defeated by the current system it self the promotes neither MMR or winning.

ELO is an MMR system. If you want to get specific, I believe GW2 uses a derivation of Glicko (which is also an MMR system, just newer & more complex than Elo’s). Any ratings-based system purposed around ranking players is technically an MMR algorithm.
It’s silly to argue that the players ranked near the top are not the more skilled. At least not in a fair environment. Teams vs solo is the only thing really hindering that fairness. Maybe class balance to some extent.