Guild Wars 2

Bjarkov.9751:

Its very easy to get the armor guys, like seriously. If you want it that badly go do sw cf for an hour or kill the vinewrath, you will get the pieces in no time.

Doesn’t matter, it’s still not fair for people who already completed it to be rewarded 5 less pieces of armor than people who haven’t done it yet.

Ravenmoon.5318:

My god the amount of bad players is astonishing. The reason people stacked revs was precisely the fact that it’s taxing the single rev too much. If they focus on boon they are free kill.

And who’s this guy talking about protection uptime and then saying that you can AA until your opponent dies. What the kitten mate? Did you ever get out of amber? Who the kitten AAs to kill someone <o> (beside thieves, but lets face it, that’s ANets design there) what opponents are you playing against … seriously? When I play rev I constantly switch back and forth through shiro/glint depending on the situation because there is this thing called focus and you have to react to it … you know…Sure if you imply that you never attack a rev I guess AA to death is rather easy xD Let’s all conveniently forget that in order for the rev to keep the boons up they forget about utilities. Weapons are strong, but not that strong, nto by a longshot. Class stacking is what rekts balance in this game. This is precisely why reapers got the short end of the stick, because those triple reaper teams spammed so much condi that no amount of cleanse could help you in a teamfight. Chill was way too powerful. Seeing 22k chill damage was a normal thing on a 15k HP toon. I’m happy they nerfed this because your average pleb had to switch class.

Double the win because most of those reaper plebs switched to revenant thinking it’s the holy grail. Well I 3v1ed some of those in unranked. While they would’ve destroyed me on reapers.

At this point I think I’m wasting words though. If you can’t see this then you are too pleb to comment here.

P.S: Ever heard of corruption?

Yeah, I was legend both seasons with about an 80% win rate. But legend has literally no prestige, the fact you even mention the league system in tandem with skill is a joke.

The fact is that Rev has the mobility of a Thief, damage of a warrior and boons/blocks of Guardian. Revs weren’t stacked because they wanted to split the boon load between them lol they were stacked because rev is extremely mobile, high damage, hard to kill, and on top of that spams boons in glint stance. The amount of bad FotM reroll revs who could kitten on people on their main classes (just check out how many guardians and thieves and warriors rerolled rev in pro league from before hot) is hilarious. You can call people plebs and say I’m bad at the game all you want to, it just makes you look like a rev fanboy who probably couldnt kill anyone before precision strike took half a persons health on a 4 second cd.

Oh and the reason Necro is not on my list is because it was already somewhat dealt with with the chill nerf. Although a good rev was still harder to kill than a good necro, necro was the ultimate braindead class before the nerf.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Op you realise i posted the same things 2 yrs ago. It has been a steady trend in that direction and the june trait merge patch and hot were just massive pve inspired power creeps. Its way too late to bring this up. There is no going back now. The ship has well and truely sailed.

I unimstalled this game when i realised everyone had 2 minutes of protection, regen and swiftness just from general passives from spam

Yes, it’s been a stready trend for sure. However, HoT was a kind of breaking point in my mind because stuff like Tempest aura spam and Mesmer/Rev just pushed the game to the point of absurdity.

I know the ship has sailed, I’ve quit the game and don’t intend to play next season either. I just felt like posting this because really the game is in a hilarious state right now

No Walking.6349:

Stopped reading when you said that Mesmers lacked defensive abilities before HoT, because at that point I knew you had no idea what you were talking about.

If you look at Mesmer builds in competitive PvP before Hot AKA tournaments, gl finding any mesmers running defensive duelist builds.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Revenant applying boons with zero effort? Wut? Got drugs mate? You do realize if the rev keeps those boons up they cant attack right? Because that energy bar will vanish. Clearly you’ve never played rev. Like most crybabies in this forum. Anyway…

Scrapper got nerfed to the point where long time engineers don’t touch the class with 10ft pole. Scrapper is an issue at low tier play.

Tempest being toxic weeeeeell … it’s pretty much the only viable build they have. Anything else cripples their team. Same goes for chronomancer.

It’s funny because people keep asking for nerfs on already nerfed into oblivion classes

I’m disappointed, I expected to see double moa.

Have played rev, have watched pro league teams stack double rev until it was banned. Would have watched them stack triple rev if it was allowed. Saw teams grind leaderboards for pro league qualifiers with triple rev comps last season. Saw rev precision strike buffed through the roof this season (biggest LOL buff in the history of the game).

This post isn’t about what’s strong/not strong, it’s about the bad game design which promotes spam: such as Scrapper for most of HoT so far: just spam defensive weapon abilities and never die while doing a crap ton of aoe/cleave.

Tempest, sure it’s the only build they have… that doesn’t mean it’s a good build, or that we should want that type of garbage design in the game, does it? Seriously, Tempest gameplay is like a pig rolling around in the mud at mid, just spam all the buttons and team at full health coated in boons and auras. Again, yes, it can be played high skill cap, and yes, its ele’s only strong build, but this thread isn’t about balance, it’s about why the game in terms of fun, isn’t fun at all right now.

And yeah, double moa was and is ridiculous. However, in the past Mesmer was a great target with good predators like Thief, so even though Moa and Portal have been extremely strong, the Mes had to play well. This is completely negated by a bunch of passive sustain and through mechanics like 12 shatters (more if you really wanted due to alacrity) in a row all healing 1k and removing a condition. If Mes was still a glass cannon, I doubt we’d see double moa being complained about as much.

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.

Is this a joke? Of all the skills in the game you pick Wall of Reflection? lmao I hope this is a troll

It’s nice to see Anet paying attention to weak weapon sets. The damage buffs on #2, and #4 are nice changes, but Shortbow is still far from viable. I’ve considered changes for years now, and I think that the easiest way Anet could make SB more powerful and fun would be to keep the auto the same, but dramatically reduce the CDs on the other skills, so that it looks something like this:

1. 6 second CD
2. 6 second CD
3. 8 second CD
4. 10 second CD

This way Shortbow would become about landing significant pressure based on the #2,4 skills (as well as being good sources of poison and cripple on teamfight targets). And by reducing the CD times on the actives, it becomes far less centered around spamming autos. The #5 skill would be extremely good for getting off lots of well timed interrupts.

How about “Obligatory Legend” since Arenanet makes sure anyone who barely knows how to play the game gets legend if they play enough?

@OP posts gameplay of necro… first two fights he throws by not pressing stab to stomp a druid, and then not pressing stab to res his teammate.

In case you guys don’t know, the first midfight of a match is typically the number one most important fight to come out on top of if you are trying to carry bad players.

1. Nerf overpowered elite specs.
2. Allow queuing from anywhere in the game.
3. Work on improving useless utilities and weapons.

Wow congrats on beating PvE guilds who are probably just casually queueing together I guess, this thread so necessary

good

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

Don’t forget that without Druid, Ranger would be the worst class in the game, bringing essentially no useful utility, mobility, or worthwhile damage. Druid is now a must-take on Ranger until we either get another spec, or Druid gets nerfed so hard that the entire class is viable.

The overpowered chill trait on Necro has done the same thing for Necro, but not quite as badly.

It’s not really true that getting a team will help you win games at all. My win percentage in leagues so far is higher when I’m duoing or solo qing than playing with 4 or 5.

As for ranking up in leagues, I’m not sure why the entire community has decided that they deserve to keep progressing regardless of skill level. To me it seems like everyone should reach a plateau at some point. I’m not saying you are bad, but there is a possibility that the current system has decided to weigh your league ranking in a way that you are now being put against higher skill players and thus need to adapt or improve. There’s also the possibility that you’ve just had a really unlucky string of games, and you’ll continue advancing normally if you stick with it.

morrolan.9608:

infantrydiv.1620:

High tier meta almost entirely revolves around mesmer and revenant at this point, and yet here we are, still getting DH qq posts lol

PUG meta is different from high tier organised meta where you don;t necessarily get an ele or mez to deal with them. I’m finding that DHs are the used used class ATM and a lot of them are running cheez trapper runes builds. Its not even necessarily that they’re OP its that they’re exceptionally annoying to fight.

No, the “PUG meta” is only different if your MMR is really low and you get one shot because you don’t know any better, and that’s where Dragonhunters are played. They aren’t OP, they aren’t annoying to fight, and this thread is ridiculous for even existing.

High tier meta almost entirely revolves around mesmer and revenant at this point, and yet here we are, still getting DH qq posts lol

Shield is already one of the strongest warrior weapons, and warrior also does not stuggle with landspeed mobility. It struggles with staying alive and blind/evade/invuln spam.

EU already plays a scrapper, because it puts good pressure on node with a variety of team support/cc/might stacking options. I think the standard EU comp is exactly what you suggested with tempest and not druid.

the #bumser, make it happen boys Kappa

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

To lighten the mood a bit around here, what team have you most enjoyed watching so far in the pro leagues?

Favorite NA team?

http://strawpoll.me/6216332

Favorite EU team?

http://strawpoll.me/6216348

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.

Fortus.6175:

My guess is that Anet has a low budget for PvP and cant afford enough people to pay attention to the metrics and thus balance out the game.

It is truly sad, Im sure they are trying their best but it seems it isnt cutting it. Plenty of people have noticed the problem, and now even Apex Prime’s captain is speaking up to this:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/My-Opinion-After-Today-s-Pro-League

The system plus poor balance have made this season a total bust.

Lets hope ANet learn from their mistakes, own up to them and is willing to improve upon it!! I have faith in them

Talked to some apex players tonight and they are already considering swapping comps because the pro league teams have a lot on the line, so why not just play cheese to win games easily…

First time I’ve ever rooted for Abjured to beat a North American team tbh.

Photinous.4628:

I honestly don’t see any recovery that is possible from the HoT power creep. You nerf condi rev and bunker mesmer and then some other super aids bunker will dominate the meta. I’m pretty sure Anet killed their own game with this expansion.

I kind of disagree.

Right now the two other optional support classes are Tempest or Druid, both of these have obvious weaknesses and are able to be focused… in fact, we saw the Druids and Tempests being brought down more often than the Revenants running vipers in today’s matches…

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.

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.

Laraley.7695:

infantrydiv.1620:

From what I’ve heard, league play matchmaking uses both league placement and MMR, meaning that the higher your league placement is, the more likely you are to get matched vs very good players, even if your MMR is lower than theirs. For example,

Sapphire player with 1200 MMR might be considered equivalent to Emerald player with 1500 MMR, meaning that the Emerald player has a very good chance to beat the Sapphire player and thus gain a pip.

Obviously I have no details on how exactly the formula works, but from what I’ve read, this seems to be roughly how the system is functioning.

This system seems like it will work in theory to me, because it means that good players in lower leagues definitely have a chance to move up in leagues with a higher than 50% ratio in w/l.

In theory mabye, but it doesn’t really. It’s the most frustrating system I’ve ever seen. I’ve been stuck in the last tier of Sapphire for ages now. The whole freaking day I’ve been facing proleague premades and there’s literally nothing I can do as a soloquer. The system predicts you to lose, but you still lose a pip because well…who knows. So you’re stuck in the same place till you get lucky and dodge them. Also, I’ve been matched against diamond people, so I’m not sure how exactly this is working.

Well, assuming leagues are at least partially skill-based, many people will start stalling in Ruby (because it becomes impossible to move up without over 50% win ratio). So unless you are an amazing player, getting much past Ruby, as a solo player will become increasingly difficult.

I’ve also heard that Diamond players are intentionally getting Amber league players to party with them in order to climb leagues faster and decrease queue times.

If leagues start being taken very seriously, I’d fully expect people to do things like form a premade, and then have 2 of their players go on fresh MMR/amber league accounts in order to get farmable games to boost the other 3 players, if the system works the way I envision it.

I’m sure that there are a few different ways to exploit the system at this point, and I think that if leagues are actually weighting both league tier, and MMR we could see some players winding up with a lower than 50% win ratio if they get to Ruby very slowly and then keep getting matched vs far better players due to their league status, rather than their MMR.

From what I’ve heard, league play matchmaking uses both league placement and MMR, meaning that the higher your league placement is, the more likely you are to get matched vs very good players, even if your MMR is lower than theirs. For example,

Sapphire player with 1200 MMR might be considered equivalent to Emerald player with 1500 MMR, meaning that the Emerald player has a very good chance to beat the Sapphire player and thus gain a pip.

Obviously I have no details on how exactly the formula works, but from what I’ve read, this seems to be roughly how the system is functioning.

This system seems like it will work in theory to me, because it means that good players in lower leagues definitely have a chance to move up in leagues with a higher than 50% ratio in w/l.

Browrain.7346:

infantrydiv.1620:

As an NA player, EU has

-more competitive top teams
-less drama
-better rotational strategies (they look like they actually thought about splits and such)
-better team comps
-better overall skill level (even in hotjoin from what I’ve seen)
-less ego on the top teams than NA teams

-lost WTS because LOLOLOL D/D Ele and let’s nerf Rampage the week before
-get rekt EU Kappa

Wait so NA won the last WTS?

Yeah, oRNG didn’t even score over 200 pts on them in the final. Abjured strat was basically just suiciding off-tanks on every node the whole game.

As an NA player, EU has

-more competitive top teams
-less drama
-better rotational strategies (they look like they actually thought about splits and such)
-better team comps
-better overall skill level (even in hotjoin from what I’ve seen)
-less ego on the top teams than NA teams

-lost WTS because LOLOLOL D/D Ele and let’s nerf Rampage the week before
-get rekt EU Kappa

Opc.4718:

Just turn off map chat or team chat and you won’t see any of it.

TBH, right now that’s the only way to communicate to your team, sometimes important info like “I have two enemy players coming to me on home”

I think that they should implement a simple hotkey message system with commands like:

“Watch the node” “1,2,3,4,5 incoming” “Help!” “Disengage/Retreat!”

commands like this could just make the game better as a whole, and allow for smoother communication in combat

Drekor.5217:

I had 2 matches that I lost and didn’t lose anything(both against premades) then got the most awful premade imaginable on my team and lost and lost 2 pips.

To me it seems like the system is factoring in whether or not a team is premade or not into their likelyhood to win. In fact, many so called ‘premades’ are just random groups of friends not even on voice comms together, who generally aren’t much more organized than random players to begin with. So, you probably got one of those types of groups, and the system expected them to win based on their premade status, which is why you lost 2 pips.

For example I was queueing with 4 friends earlier, not on voice comms, and we went vs 3-4 pro league players on enemy team, lost 500-250 and lost 2 pips. Even though that’s about the score I would have expected.

One thing Arenanet could do would be to implement a feature where you can ignore all chat which doesn’t come from your party members or friends, as well as to appear offline to anyone who isn’t partied or friend’ed. I think games like Hearthstone and WoW maintain a better atmosphere of civility by not allowing opposing players to message each other during the game.

Yes, I got 1 pip off losing a match 500-450 while duo queueing to a full premade of players who I know are pretty good.

Why would the system do this? Not exactly sure, because I don’t even remember waiting particularly long for the queue to pop, meaning that the system apparently wasn’t desperate to find a match, but I was put in a match where it felt I had extremely low chance to win.

Historically there is no indication that Arenanet has ever done anything whatsoever to punish afkers, other than dishonor.

There are players with hundreds of reports for afking and raging still on the loose, and some of them are extremely well known.

Pretty sure the people who get to fight the bottom 3 pro league teams will just be selected from the teams on the guild leaderboard that are not already part of the pro league, otherwise Abjured would always be fighting them.

Yeah, I mean I just got an INSTANT queue pop into a full premade that had a dc and my team couldn’t win a 5v4 because they kept dying to bunker mesmers 1v1.

Laserbolt.6731:

So, then, it’s a yes. They will be matched with whomever is in the Q at the moment, regardless of MMR, and league rank. Preference would be to create close matches, but as before, he matcher eventually just throws the lambs to the lions.

If your MMR is at Pro League level, then you will probably end up being matched vs pro league teams. Leagues seem to be a non-factor in match making, although its hard to tell so far.

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.

Because Arenanet seems to have not erased MMR, league play is just one giant grind to get to a legend rank that means nothing.

As long as the game still makes matches based off MMR and not league rank, you could have people with 1000 mmr in diamond tier vs other 1000s, and people with 3000 vs other 3000s. It doesn’t make any sense, but it looks like leagues will be another failure in an extremely, disturbingly long line of failures for PvP infrastructure.

On a brighter note, the Guild Challenger league IS MMR based and I think will be healthy for the competitive scene.

Adjust.6903:

Yeah I’m going to try some chrono bunker and mainly some tempest aura, looks fun. Zerker and condi get boring fast and everyone runs them.

Lol

Laserbolt.6731:

And that’s with a good team on voice comms.

I don’t think a soloQ PUG has a chance, because they would be facing coordinated teams.

I had a 62% win rate, mostly solo qing and duo queueing unranked queue over the past two months while meeting a good amount of trio qs to premades. I think it’s possible, but I’m expecting my win rate as a soloer after leagues to be more like 55% now, which means 1 pip gained per 2.5 hours played… meaning I’d have to play more like 4-5 hours per day to get to legend :/

Well I think except for amber league, the rest of the divisions include 93 pips.

Playing 10 games a night, at 10 minutes per game + 2 minute waiting period + 3 minute queue time would take 2.5 hours.

Winning 60% of your games would mean you go 6-4 on average every night, so a net +2 pips per day, meaning 47 days to reach the end of legendary division.

So yes, it’s definitely possible, and even a small increase in win rate would drastically speed the progression up, for example 65% would mean 3 pips per day, or 31 days to reach legend at 2.5 hours of play per day

Alekt.5803:

infantrydiv.1620:

I think celestial just needs a flat nerf across the board, and it could be updated to include expertise/concentration to make the power and condition damage stats even smaller.

Celestial is mostly used by some classes like Elementalist who simply cannot take any other amulets for a balanced build.

Perhaps if Celestial was nerfed, Elementalist would get buffed so that it could have builds that fulfilled different roles than just offensive tank support

I think celestial just needs a flat nerf across the board, and it could be updated to include expertise/concentration to make the power and condition damage stats even smaller.

Yep, celestial amulet will continue to dominate as long as there are classes that can do both power and condi damage with weapon sets, since the amulet is statistically superior to other amulets both for the fact that it provides both vitality and toughness and that it gives something like 30% extra stats. The fact that Revenants are overpowered enough to get away with using viper should just show how bad balance is.

We’ll continue to see the meta degenerate like this throughout the league unless there is a balance patch.

Saizo is a great ranger and he has the best accent so I definitely recommend checking him out if you are trying to learn Druid/Ranger for sPvP :p