Guild Wars 2

I’ve been thinking about the way Guild Wars 2 handles matchmaking, and match options for a while now. As for myself, I initially bought this game for the PvE and ended up getting hooked on PvP instead because I didn’t find the PvE engaging/challenging enough. I’ve been ranked in the top 50 of both solo queue and team queue but I’ve never considered myself a ‘competitive’ player. I enjoy playing the game (sometimes) and watching streamed tournaments/matches. In short, I consider myself the kind of player that Arenanet needs if they want the PvP scene to grow

The problem I have currently is that options available for casual/noncompetitive players who just want to have fun learning different classes and fighting conquest in a less stressful environment are really lacking.

Team Queue: Team Queue is great but after I get home every day I don’t necessarily feel like trying to find another four players to join with me.

Solo Queue: This mode is a step in the right direction but is actually probably the most toxic aspect of PvP. I see almost everyone running builds like Decap Engineer or Minion Necro or bunker warrior, and the imbalanced maps Spirit Watch and Skyhammer are frustrating to anyone who wants to play a specific class.

Hotjoin: No one plays hotjoin to try and learn the conquest game mode. It is a disorganized deathmatch with rampant team stacking.
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My suggested solutions:

1. Remove the leaderboards from solo queue or create an unrated queue. This will instantly stop the majority of the complaints about Skyhammer and create a friendlier environment for new and less competitive players to enjoy playing conquest as intended.

In addition to the above reasons, I believe that removing the leaderboards from Solo Queue would increase the amount of teams being formed because there are people seeking recognition on the Solo Queue leaderboards (even though they are broken) who would now move to team queue.

2. Remove hotjoin, keep custom arenas. Why? Hotjoin is a mess and is a terrible place for new players to try and learn the game. It is not uncommon to see a full team of rank 40-50 players against eight 1-20s. The games are invariably blowouts because even if both teams have even numbers of players, you can still join the one ahead by 200 points. The new unrated queue with a hidden MMR would serve as a much better place for new players to learn the game and feel like they are participating in something meaningful.

3. At a certain point, if participation in team queue picks up, teams should be grouped together under their guild name on the leaderboards. Arenanet has not done enough to make pvping as a guild group rewarding. Winning matches with your guild should give upgrade points to your guild the same way doing guild missions or world events does.

Your Game My Rules.5324:

Well let’s be honest..

THIS PvP is “competitive casual” because there’s no competition at all. It’s not even close to be any competitive since it doesnt reward anything (#eSports)

As an exemple, the difference between a good and a bad guardian is fairly less important than a good and a bad prot/heal monk in GW1.

If you want an online game to be “casual competitive”, GW2 in its current state is perfect for you, considering it doesnt reward good players

Well, I came up with a better definition. Competitive casual is like people on a high school sports team: everyone there wants to win, but generally the emphasis, or the reason people join, is to have fun. Most people aren’t expecting to go to the Olympics, or the National Championship.

And yes, you are largely correct that there isn’t very much competition. This thread is about how normal fans/players of the game can enjoy playing the game more, which is very important if we are ever going to have competition.

Why?

To kill a warrior you need sustained damage and poison. To kill a thief you need sustain. Warriors can kill all burst builds by outsustaining them. Thief can kill all burst builds by bursting them faster than they can burst back due to shadowsteps/evades with damage. Combine Warrior and Thief and you force all other classes to go either Bunker/Condi Tank specs.

Look at viable amulets for the other classes:

Ranger: Carrion/Rabid/Settler’s
Necromancer: Rabid/ Carrion
Engineer: Rabid
Guardian: Clerics

Mesmer is unviable except for Portal. Yes, really.
Elementalist also unviable

What Thieves shut down:

-Mesmer (Can evade all shatters)
-Elementalist (Can evade all burst)

-Basically any Glass Cannon spec other than Guardian:

-Power Necromancer (Trains out of fight)
-Berserker Warrior (Trains out of fight)
- Power Ranger (Trains out of fight)

What Warriors shut down:

-Mesmer (No poison, not enough DPS)
-Elementalist (No poison, not enough sustain)
-Power specs without poisons will all lose to warrior (AKA Thief is only viable power spec)

In addition, warriors have crazy node presence, meaning that in tournament pvp if a warrior hops on your node you HAVE to get off the node and give up the point unless you are a bunker spec.

Guys, many of you are saying that removing the leaderboard wouldn’t help solo queue and would actually make it more like hotjoin.

What I would like to see is something more a long these lines:

1. Remove hotjoin, keep custom arenas
2. Add “Unrated match” which is a queue that has all maps and a hidden MMR
3. Keep solo queue, but remove skyhammer and possibly spirit watch
4. Players under rank 20 may only compete in Unrated matches to begin with, their performance in this mode will be used to calculate their Glicko rating for when they start in solo queue.

Now, I’ve made these suggestions before and people have said “But I don’t want to have to queue, hotjoin allows me to get a quick game in and leave whenever I want”. I don’t really think this holds up, GW2 games are quite short compared to MOBA games, and the queue time + game time rarely adds up to more than 20 minutes.

^Because Jonathan Sharp wants warriors to be big beefy manly chunky hunks of meatiness.

As we see tonight, on NA, the meta is quickly becoming an utter disgrace. The things people thought were overpowered, like Chill Necro and Dragonhunter are being quickly replaced with two builds in particular:

1. Bunker Mesmer
2. Condition Revenant

In fact, three teams ran identical comps tonight on NA: Double rev, double bunker mesmer, and tempest. This is probably one of the most absurd, lowest counterplay, lowest skill comps I’ve ever seen. It makes things like Reaper and Druid look ballsy and high risk.

The success of these comps hinges on a few things:

1. Infused Light: Makes it impossible for cleave comps with Scrapper, Necromancer, Warrior, etc to actually get kills, because the cleave damage heals downed players being ressed. One of the worst traits I’ve ever seen.

2. Eye for an Eye (Revenant, Retribution trait): A 3 second long taunt for CCing a rev, which can literally kill you by itself if you don’t have a stunbreak and have confusion on you). Nevermind the fact that it also gives the Revenant protection, and is on a 45 second CD, the shortest in the game for defensive traits like this.

3. Illusionary Inspiration (Mesmer, Inspiration trait): Remember when Rangers could self stack quickness and 25 might with HaO, and remember when that got nerfed within 48 hours? Well, enter Illusionary Inspiration, where mesmers can do that for their entire team in a mid fight every 30 seconds.

4. Lack of counterplay: So, how does one actually go about killing a Bunker Mesmer? Let’s recount what they have:

-4 instant cast heals (for every shatter), all remove a condition
-1 well heal with half second cast time, 7k
-Generally permanent protection from chaos armor (constantly available from wells)
-Illusionary Defense stacking more damage reduction
-Bountiful Illusions giving extremely high stability uptime + emergency resistance
-Well of Precognition, Distortion, Blurred Frenzy, and Echo of Memory for extreme defense against power based damage
-Extremely strong AoE CC with Gravity well + Chaos Storm + Tides of Time

If these two builds remain untouched, we will without a doubt be witness to the most boring, disgusting pro league matches Guild Wars 2 has even seen for the forseeable future. This is 100% Arenanet’s fault for adding these type of uncounterable mechanics to the game, and it’s their job to fix it in a timely manner.

Signed,

Someone who cares about the game and has no conflicting interest in what happens in the Pro League other than the success and enjoyability of the tournament for players and viewers.

No. They made it seem like it would be for a while, but everyone has known for about a month now that the patch is coming in either april or may…

This thread is intended for sPvP beginners. My tips might seem obvious, but they are mistakes I see made over and over again by beginning and intermediate players (as well as myself!).

If anyone else has basic tips they would like to see added, let me know!

Tips for fighting:

1. Stay Moving: I cannot count how many times I see inexperienced players come to a complete stop to try and execute a skill combo. If you watch high tier players, it’s easy to notice one thing: They never stop moving unless they have an overwhelming positional advantage. Stopping moving while fighting is giving your opponent license to unload any skill he wants on you.

2. Watch Your Opponent, Not Yourself!: Watching your action bar instead of watching your opponent would be like trying to win a fist fight while looking into a hand mirror. To become proficient at fighting, you need to feel comfortable enough with your action bar and your keybinds to be able to be watching your opponent while you execute your skills.

3. Learn Your Specific Build: This point ties into the above points. If you haven’t played a lot with your build, you will have to look at your action bar to know what skills you can use. That puts you at a great disadvantage. Playing a build for a long time helps you to learn to nuances of it to a greater degree and be more effective.

4. Keybinds Are Important: It’s essential to find keybinds that are comfortable and work for your playstyle. These keybinds should allow you to be moving at all times while using any skill in your kitten nal. You also need to learn them well enough so that you never need to look at your action bar.

Tips for beginning tPvP:

1. Don’t Stand On One Point: Although capping and aggressively guarding one point seems like it might be a smart thing to do, it’s almost always preferable to be moving from one point to the next helping your teammates. The goal of conquest is to create uneven fights by winning 1v1s and 2v2s and then pressing your advantage to other points while your opponents are respawning.

2. Know Your Role: Knowing your role basically means knowing what your build and you are best at. Builds like spirit ranger and condition necromancer are best at mid fighting and home point defense due to their low mobility and AoE/support abilities. Highly mobile classes such as thief, warrior, and engineer are great for decapping points and briefly aiding the middle might. You would never want to fight at mid all game on a thief, but on a bunker guardian, that would be perfectly acceptable!

3. Far Point Is Dangerous: Unless you are sure of what you are doing, running far point is almost always going to be a negative for your team, especially if you are a beginner. Far point is always going to have passing enemy respawns and you will be isolated from the rest of your team. Losing a 1v1 on a far point allows the enemy to send one extra person to attack another point and can potentially wipe your whole team.

We need a visible MMR leaderboard based on Glicko2, not some horrible system the devs just randomly came up with.

Arenanet keeps trying to reinvent to wheel, just give us back the old leaderboards with permanent decay. It’s so stupid that they can mess up such simple stuff like this so badly.

Also remove hotjoin (leave custom arenas as selectable from the list) and have Casual queue, ranked solo queue, and ranked team queue.

Justin is the new PvP forum Most Valuable Dev

Clarification: These are not all top tier tournament specs, I’ve singled out the specs I find least fun to play against. Specs that go against the spirit of conquest in general or have massive amounts of clutter/bad mechanics.

I hear a lot of people on these forums say meta specs like hambow and condition engies/necros, , spirit rangers, bunker guardians take no skill.

For me, I’ve grown to understand these meta specs, and I honestly don’t mind playing against them. Yes, they all have passives and irritating things about them, but overall I find that the above listed builds do fit the descriptions and the general playstyle these classes should exhibit

Then there is a different tier of specs entirely, which I absolutely hate playing against:

-Condition Automated Response Engineer: Yes, Automated response isn’t that good for team queue. However, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an Automated Response Engi running around at 20% health for almost the entirety of a solo queue game. It’s stupid. It should be removed.

-Minion Necromancer: Differing from the AR Engi, the MM relies on extreme passive damage instead of passive survivability. Minions can deal thousands of damage in seconds if you arent constantly evading or blinding them. This is a 1v1 spec that puts the burden totally on the other play to outplay it. Oh, and you are also punished for killing the minions because they explode on death (which is also unblockable). It’s stupid. It should be removed.

-PU Mesmer: Not seen much in tpvp, but again: Summon phantasms, stealth, wait for enemy to kill what is damaging him and get giant stacks of condis because he kills your clones all while you gain aegis and protection and regen. It’s stupid, it should be removed.

-Decap Engineer: A spec that is based around shoving your enemy off point and forcing them to 2v1 you due to the fact that you are incredibly tanky and have Automated Response. Totally against the spirit of PvP/Conquest in general. Arenanet should create a special mode calling Engi Sumo wrestling, ban these guys from normal pvp, and send them there. They can even have their own leaderboards.

-Sword/Pistol Thief: The idea behind thief sword gameplay appears to be using 2 to port to your enemy and then being vulnerable while you deliver burst, and then being smart about when to port back or swap weapons. Well, GUESS WHAT with sword/pistol you get to evade during your burst. Another stupid spec which should be fixed.

It’s a tax on NA for being less esports

Easy fix???

I don’t see what would be wrong about this change since rank 80 takes so long to get anyway

Your Game My Rules.5324:

Sorry mate but competitive and casual are 2 different things that cant be matched together

Well, if your definition of casual is ‘uncompetitive", I suppose that’s true.

However, I think of the ‘competitive casual’ as an average player who wants to improve and become good at the game, but doesn’t plan on participating in major tournaments and doesn’t always want to take the game extremely seriously. This contrasts with the plain casual players who are literally just in pvp to do dailies or goof off and don’t really care if they get better or not.

I would have to say that there IS a problem with thieves causing other classes to not have viable GC specs.

You can’t really run a glass cannon mesmer, ele, ranger, warrior, necro against a thief and expect to win. Of course, the tankier specs these classes have do just fine against thieves.

The ideal ‘meta game’ for Guild Wars 2 would be one in which every class was not forced into particular traits or weaponsets in order to be viable but instead could create a kit designed for a specific purpose and do well with it.
This thread intends to serve as a discussion of balance of a class within the class itself. This is not a topic I often hear discussed when balance is on the table. “Individual Class Balance” explores the idea that a Ranger requiring Empathic Bond, or a Warrior requiring Cleansing Ire is bad design.

I’m going to start with Warrior as an example:
Warriors are intended to be the strongest melee class with a weakness to conditions and being kited. Their high base health and armor is supposed to in part, make up for this.
Back in the first half of 2013, warriors were not considered viable and received a number of extremely large buffs which turned their weaknesses into strengths overnight.

Currently, any ‘meta’ warrior spec has four (or five) things in common:

1. Healing Signet
2. Longbow (Primarily, Combustive Shot and Pin Down)
3. Cleansing Ire
4. (Burst Mastery)
5. Berserker’s Stance

These five aspects of the warrior represent a tiny part of the class as a whole, but for the past 6 months they have been allowed to pidgeonhole both warrior build diversity and other class diversity as well. In fact, each class has a choice of 75 traits, dozens of weapon skills, and over 25 slot skills.

Now, if I was balancing for Arenanet, I would try and conduct my balance endeavors in the following way:
1. Single out the biggest problems making a class too powerful as I have done above
2. Give those things substantial nerfs.
3. Look for the weakest parts of the class
4. Give those parts substantial buffs

For example, “On My Mark” applies 10 stacks of vulnerability to a single target on a 30 second cooldown. This utility is terrible by any sense of the word. I would look for a way to improve the worthless skills in a class kitten nal like “On My Mark” until finally, someone says, "Wait a minute, “On My Mark” is good for this situation or this build!"
By balancing classes like this, instead of doing extremely minor nerfs to the meta builds, we would see classes because more balanced within themselves. We would also see a much slower power creep, if any, if this was done correctly.

A different example of the same type of internal class imbalance could be Ranger. Rangers are completely reliant upon 30 points into Wilderness Survival which increases Toughness and Condition Damage for survival. This line contains the Grandmaster trait Empathic Bond which is their only good condition removal. In addition, the only build that allows a ranger to have a substantial effect upon a team fight is through the use of spirits, and the Elite Spirit of Nature is by far the best Elite skill they can take.

So, Rangers are pidgeonholed similarly to Warrior:

1. Empathic Bond (parallel = Cleansing Ire)
2. Spirit of Nature

Just to acquire these two things causes Rangers to use up 50-60 trait points. Pidgeonholed? I think so.
If for example, Empathic Bond and Spirit of Nature were removed entirely, Ranger would be on a completely different power level than what it currently resides at. It would also actually be better balanced as well because these two things are just so much stronger than any other options. I’m not saying that these two abilities should be removed entirely, just that they should be brought down while other Ranger abilities are brought up.

To me, when I hear Arenanet talk about balance, it always feels like they are looking at overall class balance. In other words, they look at it like this: Warrior? Ok it has a role in the meta, good! Ranger? It has a role in the meta, nice! Elementalists? Hmm, it doesn’t have a role in the meta, better give them some crazy buffs!

This style of balancing will never lead to an interesting game. Guild Wars 2 only has 8 classes. We need these classes to be diverse in what they can bring to the table. We need them to be balanced within themselves, so that you aren’t forced to take 1 or 2 major abilities that completely define your gameplay experience.

There is a difference between easy to play builds and easy to play builds which are the best in the game.

New players shouldn’t expect to instantly ‘be good’ when they start. They shouldn’t expect to win 1v1s. But luckily, they have builds like hambow warrior and spirit ranger to help them out.

Your thought process makes no sense. Popular sports and games have a clear skill curve where the high tier players are leagues better than the beginners. That skill curve in GW2 is currently very unclear.

So, NA Tournament of Legends: 3 of the top 4 teams are running double warrior.

Why is this? You take the easiest class in the game to play. You introduce strength runes. You slap on a Soldier’s amulet and run around all game with 20 stacks of might dealing 500 perma burn ticks and more damage than almost a GC.

Combustive shot is an embarrassment to this game; the antithesis of a skillshot. Reduce the radius, make it actually have to touch something to clear conditions.

Warriors are running around with 3000 toughness, effective 3800 power and 800 condition damage. They also have access to the most powerful CC in the game. This spec is absurd, and is obviously forcing other classes out of the team fighter role.

Too many boons, too many conditions, too many dodges, too many low cd skills, too much condition removal, too much damage, too much tankiness, etc, etc, etc.

This has all been exacerbated to an extreme degree by HoT.

Revenant is a great example of ridiculous amounts of different things: Glint Rev can spam boons on its entire team for no effort (trivializing countless traits and support abilities other classes have), Shiro rev adds dodges/stunbreaks, then Precision Strike is a total nuke ability on a low cast time.

Mesmer: Before HoT mesmers had 4 shatter cooldowns, was weak to conditions, and lacked defensive abilities. Not anymore. With Continuum Split and shatter recharge signet, Mesmer can shatter 12 times in a row and has Shield as a low CD defensive option. Now Mesmers just build to have massive amounts of condition removal with their massive amounts of shatters. Mesmer most definitely has a high skillcap, but skillcap doesn’t define whether a game is competitive or fun. Chronomancer also added passives like 25% movement speed minor which trivialize swiftness or need for mobility from other sources

Ranger: Rather than fixing the fact that Ranger weapons generally suck, and pets are either OP or useless, HoT gave Ranger basically a get out of jail free card in Druid form traited to break stun and remove all conditions. This combined with Ranger’s naturally evasive weapons made Druid a sustain monster. Druid is basically Ranger, with 5x more sustain. So why would anyone ever play Ranger when CA is a direct addon to the base class?

Ele: Tempest is super toxic for the game with a 30 second invuln button and making midfights last 4x longer due to extremely high protection uptime and aura spam (which contributes to condition spam).

Scrapper: A masterclass in poor weapon design: hammer 2-3-4-5 all perform multiple functions on top of poorly designed passives like protection on CC, making scrapper extremely durable and forgiving.

Basically, EVERYTHING that is meta in the game needs to be toned down. Remember when Hambow was OP? Now-a-days you could tank literally every attack from a hambow on a Druid or Mes or Ele and sustain straight through it. The game needs more viable purely offensive or defensive weapon sets. Examples like Warrior Hammer, Mesmer GS, Guardian GS, Engineer Rifle from previous metas were more exciting to play and watch than things like Mes Sword/Shield or Scrapper Hammer.

Seriously, the condition changes are good, but that movement change is cringe-worthy.

As a fan of the game who has watched every major tournament since Pax Prime and many, many ESL/Go4 tournaments I can say that tonight’s tournament was the worst and least hype tournament I’ve ever personally seen.

The fact that EzPz swapped out 3 of their players to alt classes (rev/bunk mes/scrapper) and it made a 400 pt difference to their game just goes to show how low skill the current bunker/condi meta is.

I will, for the first time, not be watching any more league play until there is a patch to these types of boring builds (especially bunker mesmer), which allows players to win without even trying.

ensoriki.5789:

Why did you analize the ele instead of analyse it?

Cause eles take it in the kitten Xd

I enjoy watching it

/shrug

Although I’m not entirely unhappy with today’s Ranger buffs (and the Taunt fix which was totally called for), changes like what happened to Heal as One tells me that Arenanet continues to not listen to actual Ranger feedback.

The kind of buffs we needed were the kind of buffs Necromancer got: good buffs to weak weapon sets and utilities.

We’ve seen Arenanet leave specific weaponsets at meta-breaking levels of imbalance for YEARS (take a look at Hambow or D/D ele) and this imo is the #1 cause of stale meta feeling. I hate to see this happening to the Ranger, which although weak during the Cele Ele/Engineer meta, was still well balanced internally.

We don’t need some weird insane might stack + perma quickness tied around a heal skill. It’s janky and random and in all honesty not fun.

Ranger is now pretty much a Longbow based class. It’s like Warrior was, but worse, because the Longbow is entirely dominant among all the weapon sets.

Greatsword attacks remain pitifully weak (when you exclude cheese might swapping or cheesy cooldown stacking like Signet of the Hunt +Signet of the Wild).

Mainhand Axe does pretty wretched power based damage, and Bleeding damage was just nerfed by 20% in the condi damage patch. Unlike necromancer scepter or Axe, we’ve received entirely no compensation for this.

Shortbow is now officially one of the worst weapons in the game. Seriously, try killing an Elementalist or Warrior or Thief or Mesmer or anything with Shortbow as a condi Ranger. It’s also incredibly poorly designed with the entire bulk of damage residing in #2 and the autoattack.

Today we got a buff to Warhorn 5, but not Warhorn 4 which is the skill everyone has been saying needs to be changed for YEARS.

And finally (I’m not gonna even discuss OH Axe at this point), we are still stuck with a dysfunctional sword autoattack that locks us in place. Imagine if Mesmer or Thief sword autos stuck them in place… I wonder how long ago it would have been changed.

Now what I’m worried about is that with this awful Heal as One change (which should be reverted, or have its functionality drastically reduced), Ranger balance has been thrown entirely out of whack and we’ll start seeing weird nerfs because of it.

I do appreciate that the devs are trying to bring Ranger back into the PvP meta, but buffs like this go about it the wrong way.

Also, what they did to Spirits is truly a shame, because the utility was entirely balanced in PvP and WvW roaming, seeing some use, but not over represented. They took that and destroyed it entirely.

It isn’t ironic though, Abjured would have played Minstrels too if it helped them win, even if they didn’t like it.

The people in pro leagues are there to win matches and money, not to play honourably. It’s Arenanet’s job to fix the game, which they apparently aren’t going to do.

Reasons:

1. Skyhammer: The map ruins the whole experience and causes rage for both teams.

2. Skyhammer.

Right now Ranger Greatsword lacks a lot of synergy in most parts of the game.

It isn’t used much in PvP, because its melee with not a lot of CC. In WvW it’s decent for zering, but again it isn’t amazing. In PvE it just flat out sucks because the auto DPS is so low.

Maul is one of the most highly telegraphed attacks in the game and without a lot of prebuffing doesn’t do much damage.

By adding a blast finisher, it would reward skillful play, and we might start seeing Rangers more accepted in zergs, because a good melee blast finisher like that on a tanky character would be an asset.

In PvP, Maul might need to have it’s CD slightly increased, but it would synergize well with traps, as well as in team fights.

By far the most entertaining and sensible part of the tournament

It’s too bad all 8 teams didn’t ragequit the tournament and save 3,000 people 3 hours each, that would have been 9,000 hours saved or 375 days. Collectively, we wasted over a year of life on that borefest

Thief aint need buff brah l0l nub press 2 more heartseaker hearseaker afk ded

To make outcomes in Solo queue less comp based, I suggest that Arenanet implement a system where people define their role when they queue from a selection of 5 basic types:

1. Bunker: Attempts to stay on the mid point and cap it while supporting team mates. Examples: Bunker Warrior, Bunker Guardian

2. Brawler: A build intended for team fighting. Examples: Hambow, Condi Necro

3. Support: A build which brings teamwide power ups or healing. Example: Cleric Staff Ele, Spirit Ranger

4. Duelist: A build intended to win far point, or defend home node. Examples: Axe/Sword Warrior, Beastmaster Ranger, Minion Necro

5. Roamer: A high mobility burst build intended to finish fights with unpredictable spike. Examples: Thief, Portal Mesmer

Solo Queue matchmaking could be changed so that a team requires a Bunker, Support, and Brawler (the teamfighting core), and then a mix of Duelist, Brawler, and Roamer builds. These roles could all be marked by an icon in the party UI so that teams could just look and understand who intends to go where at the beginning of the fight.

Not only would this create more even matches which aren’t decided based on comp alone, it would allow more people to play the way they want to in each match. For example, you wouldn’t have games with 3 far point pushers or 4 bunkers or 5 roamers. If you queued with a particular role set, you would be able to perform that role in general. This would also make solo queue better practice for those looking to perform seriously in team queue.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

I know it is only your opinion, but I think you have greatly underestimated necromancer in PvP.

1) Ranger is in a solid place. It just really needs pets, the placement of many traits and a handful of its under loved skills to be reworked to finally be in a place where it can actually threaten now.

2) Ele was in a great place, then it got nerfed. Even A-net has said they may have over done it. Change nothing on them, just return some of what they had.

These are 2 examples of where it is not the warrior or the thieve’s fault. Ohters have been diminished, or made awkward to play and as a result the less awkward professions now have the upper hand. However before all the ranger pet, shortbow nerfs and the destruction of ele, both warrior/thief didn’t feel overly strong against them. In fact for the longest time of all professions warrior was considered the sickly child. Nerfing warrior/thief isn’t the fix. The problem was others got nerfed too hard and warrior buffed too much. However warrior has been brought down multiple scales over the last updates, however they still feel strong purely at this point because of how heavily others were nerfed right before they received their first buffs. It only highlights how nevere some professions got nerfed and how some got overly buffed.

In high level team queue, if you are gonna play necro you are FAR better off running a condition necromancer. Power necro isn’t nearly as good, sorry.

1. Condition ranger is in a good place, power ranger is not.

2. Eles received some minor nerfs and now can no longer kill warriors or thieves because they were both buffed. Warrior has far too much sustain, and giving the strongest passive heal in the game to a class with great condition removal as well as invulnerabilities to both direct damage/condi damage is bad design.

Hi everyone,

Recent changes have made me wonder about Arenanet’s overall goals for PvP. We saw the introduction of the map vote system and the ready check system, both of which have been great for the game. Queue times are also a bit shorter. However, we also saw the removal of solo queue and the addition of a leaderboard which by any normal standard made the old leaderboard look good. In addition, matchmaking is now frequently pairing teams of solo players against full premades. Class stacking and imbalanced compositions seem to not have changed much either as was initially promised.

I would contend that from a competitive viewpoint, the state of PvP is actually worse off now than it was before the infrastructure patch which made these changes. Unranked queue is definitely great for beginners and people from other areas of the game who want to hop into PvP with friends. Yet, a lot of these people never intend to take the game seriously, gain leaderboard standing, or even watch tournaments. In my opinion, most of the viewership of esports games like LoL or CS:GO comes from solo players who enjoy laddering but who simply don’t have enough time or commitment to join an actual team. They have a very strong understanding of whatever game they play, but don’t belong to a competitive team or organization. Their primary means of competition and improvement for the average player comes from solo queue.

That said, I believe that the same also stands for Guild Wars 2. Sure, the ideal scenario for becoming competitive in this game would be finding a group of 4 great friends and all improving together every day in Team Queue. This just isn’t a reality for the large majority of players. If you look at current teams right now, the top teams have basically been playing together since the game came out. The newer/second tier teams have quite a few players from solo queue in them. I’d be willing to bet that the majority of tournament viewership for this game over the course of its existence was players with some amount of investment in solo queue as well.

In addition to solo queue being a practical necessity for a competitive game, a functioning leaderboard system is also pretty much mandatory. Most people aren’t going to want to take a game seriously if they have literally nothing to show for it in the end. This has always been a big problem for GW2 PvP: how to tell if you’ve actually improved, how to tell who is better/worse than you are, and finding a reason to continue to play hundreds and thousands of games with hardly any rewards or prestige tied to it. The fact is that the current leaderboard system is not a leaderboard. It’s entirely dictated by how much you player (as seen by the 40%-80% win ratio spread in the top 100 players). The only people this is an incentive for are either people who don’t realize the leaderboard is not skill based, or the people hoping to trick people into thinking they are skilled based on a phony leaderboard ranking. Then there are people who just play tons of games and don’t care about the leaderboard at all, which is fine.

Not having a working leaderboard or visible MMR system also incredibly hampers the ability of players to find similarly skilled/like-minded players to form actual teams with. It creates an atmosphere of ambiguity as well which leads to more trash talking and toxicity in general. It is almost a certainty that if the game had visible MMR, you’d see people in HotM using solo q rating/ranking to create pick up groups of similarly skilled players. This in turn would eventually benefit the top echelon of PvP teams when some highly skilled groups of solo players converted to tournament teams.

You should read my post, but tl;dr:

1. Ranked Solo queue is necessary for building a tournament viewership and fostering competition among newer players.

2. A working leaderboard is a must have incentive if the game aims to become competitive.

3. Visible MMR would lead to an increase in the number of actual teams. It would also lead to a less toxic community.

So far my feedback:

1. Glyphs aren’t very good, especially the heal one (it just doesnt do enough healing compared to the other heals, Healing Spring is a straight up better heal in a team fight). I’d suggest some cooldown reductions in general

2. I think Ranger generally has a lot of synergy with regen in multiple traitlines, it would be really great if you would make Regen count towards charging celestial form. It shouldn’t be 2.5%, maybe just the same as damage or .5% or so, that way skills like traited warhorn 5, shouts, and healing spring would all synergize better with Druid.

3. An AoE blind placed on Staff 3 would be really good for Staff imo. Vine Surge (Staff 4) needs a slightly large cone radius or else it is extremely hard to land on targets.

4. Was Celestial Form completely draining upon canceling it intended behavior? I was under the impression it would function like Necro death shroud and save whatever percentage wasnt used.

Kagamiku.9731:

Who cares? If strength runes are your excuse for why warriors are OP, then you nerf the runes, not the warrior. Pigeonhole warriors even more into being forced to take a certain build. You’re so smart!

As for 2-handers, so? There was no issue back when 2-handers only allowed one sigil slot. The only fair thing to do would be to revert that change, or make it so that 2-handers can’t use two in pvp. Leave warrior traits as they are. They’re not whats making them “OP”. It’s so cruel of them to have two-handed weapons that are actually useful, is it not?

Are you deliberately avoiding confronting the logic behind my posts? Do I need to spell it out in simpler words for you?

Warriors (in particular Hambow) benefited more from the sigil changes than other classes because:

A. They use two twohanded weapons = two extra sigils, compared with 1 for most other classes
B. They have extremely fast weapon swapping meaning that they can might stack extremely easily as well

As for strength runes, they are helping ele out in the meta a lot. But, warrior did not need strength runes so be viable. In fact, warrior was still top tier right before the patch hit.

Combustive Shot has been a problem from the first patch in which Warrior saw the addition of Cleansing Ire. Why? Because Combustive Shot, on a 7 second cooldown, became extremely powerful guaranteed condition removal. All other warrior burst skills are able to be blinded or dodged. For this reason alone, until something is done about Combustive Shot, warriors will be forced to run longbow to compete.

Warriors’ weakness, when the game was released, was supposed to be conditions. Now, equipped with cleansing ire, berserker’s stance, and a massive starting health pool, warriors are juggernauts.

This is my personal opinion about GW2. Anyone who feels differently is welcome to disagree and tell me why

I’ve played GW2 for over a thousand hours. I’ve completed the story mission. I’ve gotten world completion. I’ve participated in WvW and PvP and dungeons.

I don’t feel like my character is really a part of a fantasy world. The game feels highly segmented and the lore feels both flippant and disunified.

Even in single player games, I feel the world is more ‘alive’ than Guild Wars 2 with its servers full of people.

The living story writing is shallow and unconvincing. The open world PvE is totally boring. Now Arenanet has implemented open world farming where the whole purpose is to run around with a giant swarm of other players and slaughter mobs.

WvW is a laggy zergfest that has no connection to lore or anything else (compared to faction gameplay in say, Rift or the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online).

I still play Guild Wars, but only because I like the combat system.

How does everyone else feel? Do you feel connected to this world? Are you ever excited to explore or do heart quests or story missions? I doubt it, but I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts.

Skill unlocks are TERRIBLE. And annoying. This is what we have Wvw for Arenanet. Stop adding these. No one wants them.

Can you fix the bug where matches start 4v5?

Oh dear, that sounds expensive…

In addition, I think giving the option to 1 team to resign if they are more than 200 points behind is completely reasonable.

“generic p2w” implies microtransactions such as purchasing the strongest armor and weapons with real money and whatnot.

I’m going to assume this is a troll thread since every single other MMO at expansion raises the level cap, meaning anyone who doesn’t buy it is not even able to reach max level and participating in PvP content would be suicide.

Are Elite specs too strong compared to the base specs right now? For the most part, yes. Does that make the game pay 2 win? Nope. Get your facts straight please.

Actually, I think most of the community would rather see you buff the numerous worthless utilities many classes have, rather than adding new ones and upsetting an already imbalanced game further.

Maybe if you wanted a more mobile class you shouldn’t have picked the heavy armor white mage archetype ^.^ not known for being particularly nimble

Warrior is in need of help. Arenanet has added so much blind spam to the game that the penalty for missing f1 attacks should be removed.

Berserker isn’t played simply for the fact that it replaces many burst skills with inferior attacks, at least, that’s how it seems to me.

Another thing is that while many classes got extra types of utility or abilities, the Warrior is a super simple and obviously telegraphed class, and that doesn’t change with the rage mechanic. Basically Warrior doesn’t actually bring much to the table.

This is just a suggestion, but I feel that currently, in tPvP, there is not enough punishment for becoming downed. Good teams can rez almost instantly, which does take coordination, but when you see people get resed 3+ times in a row, it gets kind of silly.

What if, keeping downstate the same as it is, 5 points are awarded to a teams score for downing, and then another 5 points are awarded on completion of stomp, or cleave death of a player.

This isn’t as dramatic of a change as altogether removing downstate (which I believe would be extremely beneficial for WvW and PvE, not so much for PvP), but it does add extra punishment for becoming downed frequently and needing a res from your team.

I love it when the deciding factor in a match is: “Who has more clueless people on a class they don’t know how to play?”

Everything I’ve seen points to matchmaking still being entirely determined based on MMR, not league position. League position is essentially meaningless, just a number based on amount of games played x percent of games won.

Essentially, it appears that Arenanet is using leagues as a way to pretend that the game has prestige while still hiding personal MMR, after years of people requesting an actually skill-based leaderboard/league/ladder system.