Guild Wars 2

Korgov.7645:

naphack.9346:

Korgov.7645:

• Warscore is used to determine the winner of a Skirmish
• Skirmishes award varying amounts of Victory Points based on placement

I assume that “based on placement” refers refers to server’s Glicko ratings.

I’m glad to hear there is only 1 winner of each Skirmish. Every server will fight for the win instead of double teaming on the weakest server to secure the easiest PPT. I would expect the 2 top servers to go after each other instead.

OTOH the increase in PPK will probably steer the top servers to pick on the smallest team for safe points.

Or will there be Victory Points for servers not winning the Skirmish? Then we’d be in no better place than today.

It’s based on your standing in skirmish points.
For example, first place gets 3 points, second place gets 1 point, third place gets none.
Or 6-3-1, 5-2-0, 4-2-1 or how ever else they ultimately decide to split it.

That sounds bad. Then the second server will focus on the weakest the moment they realize they won’t win a Skirmish. This kind of scoring system ruins the 3-way battle.

Well, if the second place doesn’t receive any points, what incentive is there for the weakest to stay in at all? It’s not like they will be able to knock out both servers, who have more points than them.

What kind of stealth gankers are you talking about?
A group of 3 thieves just sitting on a random route and farming anyone who passes by? There is no counter to being outnumbered. Clench your buttcheeks and keep running.
If we are talking about single gankers or stalkers following a group, the answer is quite simple: Keep running and punch them in the face whenever they show up. Don’t try to catch them, just punch them hard and continue to your original destination whenever they attempt to reset the fight.
You will never beat them by playing their game or by trying to avoid them. stand tall and kick them in the face whenever they show up.

I’ve thought it through for a bit and came up with the following system:
Rather than holding singular objectives, servers should be rewarded for holding clusters of objectives. Therefore, successful supply deliveries should be incentivized.
So rather than scaling the ppt for holding objectives for a long time, we could scale the points gained for supply delivieries with the level of the objectives, for example, whenever a caravan reaches an objective(note, this is distinctively different from the current system, where points are only rewarded at the final objective), the server that controls both the caravan and the objective(if they don’t match, there will be no points) receive 8+a+b (just some random suggestion) points, where a is the upgrade level of the supply camp and b is the upgrade level of the receiving objective. Maybe even do away with PPT entirely and scale the baseline points and b according to which type of objective receives the delivery.
This would reward servers for keeping control of the areas around their fortified objectives and tearing deep into the opponent’s lands, rather than just running around in circles, tearing down wooden objectives.
Killed Dolyaks would be worth 9 points regardless of the upgrade status of the involved objectives.

Korgov.7645:

• Warscore is used to determine the winner of a Skirmish
• Skirmishes award varying amounts of Victory Points based on placement

I assume that “based on placement” refers refers to server’s Glicko ratings.

I’m glad to hear there is only 1 winner of each Skirmish. Every server will fight for the win instead of double teaming on the weakest server to secure the easiest PPT. I would expect the 2 top servers to go after each other instead.

OTOH the increase in PPK will probably steer the top servers to pick on the smallest team for safe points.

Or will there be Victory Points for servers not winning the Skirmish? Then we’d be in no better place than today.

It’s based on your standing in skirmish points.
For example, first place gets 3 points, second place gets 1 point, third place gets none.
Or 6-3-1, 5-2-0, 4-2-1 or how ever else they ultimately decide to split it.

I do agree that the lake tower is probably the objective in most dire need for a change.
The issue is that it has far too many weak spots (catapults in the tunnel, trebs in the ruins, trebs in hills) and it doesn’t really serve a purpose other than helping to cut off hills from supply deliveries by the south camp… which will promptly cause the guys in hills to drop a treb and start shooting.

My thoughts:
Firstly, let me voice a clear no to any scaling based on population levels, as there is no need for such a step. The skirmish system in and of itself should be enough to smooth out the nightcapping issue.
Currently, servers that are dominating the match while being opposed maybe make 50% of the score that is up for grabs, while servers that are dominating while being mostly unopposed will make at least 85% of the points that are up for grabs, with the huge score swing by dolyaks not even being accounted for. It’s probably closer to 95%. This automatically means that time segments, where a server is unopposed will contribute far more. By slicing the matchup into small skirmishes, any single time segment will contribute exactly the same amount of points. So if you beat a server consistently during 12 hours of competition and lose unopposed during 12 hours of lull, you will end up even on points, rather than being behind, as is currently the case.
After all, the main objective of the skirmish system is to normalize the points that are up for grabs for dominating a time frame, so it doesn’t matter, how hard you dominate during a certain time frame and it becomes more important to dominate that time frame in the first place and the only advantage you gain from dominating a time frame really hard is that you begin the next skirmish while being in control of most objectives.

About having upgraded objectives tick for more, I’m not quite sure, this would be a good idea. It mainly brings back the night capping issue. A server could come back to control their third of the objectives, but still be at the scoring disadvantage for a very long time.
There is an argument to be made for having tier 3 objectives award more points, but I’d rather make that exclusive to tier 3 objectives alone. Let’s face it, the biggest challenge isn’t to get an objective to tier 1 or tier 2. The only upgrade tier that’s truly special is tier 3, where some roamers simply can’t solo camps anymore, towers become tough as nails and keeps gain their precious waypoints.
There is one point that could be made: The current system doesn’t give ample reward for a caravan reaching a tier 3 objective, since the objective is already at max upgrade level. The same with tier 3 camps. Maybe that’s the point, where additional points for tier 3 objectives could be inserted. A caravan reaching a tier 3 objective grants extra points and a caravan reaching an objective from a tier 3 camp also grants extra points.
That way, digging in in tier 3 objectives after having gained total control of the map during night capping wouldn’t grant the server any benefit, if they can’t control the surrounding area. It would also give roamers more significance and give more importance to controlling an area, rather than holding an objective. It’s bonus points that are not tied directly to having control of the objective, which encourages a more active play style. Rather than the current situation, where players sometimes just give up on playing on certain borderlands entirely, because they can’t make a meaningful impact, just flipping camps would make a huge difference and maybe even serve to break up the enemy’s zerg.

Vieux P.1238:

Chase.2798:

Vieux P.1238:

Topher.5631:

The new builds are kinda fun, but the ones before HoT were much more fun imo.

Old builds? No they where not. In fact, i remembered well at the end a few month before HoT launched the betas. People had left cuz builds where in a sad state of bordem. HoT changed that for a little wile. Now you got classes that range from zero to 1 viable build. & playing the same viable build again & again is boring. But i would not want to return to Pre-HoT Builds. No thQ

I dont think he is asking for those to be the only viable builds he just wants to see a larger range of variety to let people play the way they want to play without it hurting their team

I got what he said. & it’s pretty clear what he ment. My point stands & not saying i dont want to see a wide large scales of variant builds. Dha! But i dont want to see the unbalance poopy builds we gotten before. As mentioned, turret Engies. Man that was the most stupidest build ever.

It was stupid because of sentinel amulet.
But it took arena.net another year to figure out that having those tanky amulets around isn’t necessarily a good thing.

The issue I have with DBL is that the side keeps are not like fortresses at all. They are nothing like a keep, they are modern nuclear bunkers. Instead of being a tall, imposing structure, on strategically important positions that allow whomever controls them to exert influence and keep watch on the surrounding area, they are tucked away in a remote corner, with lots of obstacles around them that make it really hard to get a clear view on the surrounding area.
In the current map design, they simply serve no purpose whatsoever.

TheGrimm.5624:

Gany.1793:

to this end, I would suggest the third map set would be…..

UNDERWATER!!!

You ambition is awesome so +1. Concern here is that they have a long way to go to balance underwater. I think they will need to get there at some point since they story line leads in that direction with one of the Dragons.

That said, I wouldn’t have high hopes until we see a successful return of a water map in sPvP. The reason for this being it would be an ideal test bed if skills can be created and balanced. Once we see that then we will be closer to see more options for WvW.

Capricorn was the best thing ever.
A power necro or a ranger would hold ruins and nobody could ever contest it because they’d just get torn to shreds… Unless they themselves ran one of those builds.

It will take another expansion for underwater combat to gain any significance.

Turret engi.
ducks

My greataxe build runs the quickness on weapon swap sigil in the greatsword.
Not sure, whether it will outperform sigil of impact in a stun based build, but it certainly is something to take a look at.

Geez, getting all worked up over a three months old post.
You must be a necro.

So since siege conditions no longer stack with player stats…
Can we get a mastery line that improves the conditions inflicted by siege weapons?
Something like:
5 -increase the damage dealt by conditions inflicted by siege weapons by 33%
10 -increase the duration of conditions inflicted by siege weapons by 25%
15 -increase the damage dealt by conditions inflicted by siege weapons by 33%
20 -increase the duration of conditions inflicted by siege weapons by 25%
25 -increase the damage dealt by conditions inflicted by siege weapons by 33%

So for a total of 75 rank points, this mastery increases the damage of siege conditions by 100% and the duration by 50%.

Answer to both: Because it’s 2016!
Guardian has been balanced around a low health pool and there is no reason to change it.

There is no strategic value to anything in the desert border lands, other than castles with waypoints.
There is little to no benefit for towers or keeps as bridgeheads for further conquest. There are so many vertical barriers and pathways that towers can easily be bypassed. They don’t serve as a base of operation, since there are no noteworthy treb targets, you could reach from them.

The problem with the desert borderlands is that holding any objectives serves no other purpose than PPT, unless you are planning on holding a keep for long enough, so it can get a waypoint.
This is completely different from the old borderlands, where holding hills, for example, was important in and of itself and getting the waypoints was merely a nice bonus. With hills, you could exert tremendous pressure on the spawn tower and the spawn camp. Someone holding a keep in desert bl? Nice for them… I guess…

It’s even more frustrating, when you have effects on dodge that could actually save your skin, but you never get to finish the dodge.

Swagger.1459:

Elite specializations were designed with HoT and raids in mind, and you are not going to get those butchered.

Two things need to be done…

1. Core weapon and slot skills need to be up to elite specialization standards. Some skills could use a major cool down reductions and/or increased potency. There is not any reason why we need over 20+ seconds on weapon skills and over 30+ seconds on slot skills in most cases for this game.

2. Balance separately for pvp (spvp/wvw/eotm) modes and pve modes. We only really need 2 sets of balancing for certain problematic things and game mechanics.

There is a big flaw with the elite spec design that won’t allow to bring core skills and traits up to par:
Any significant buff to core traits will ultimately also be a buff to elite specs.
The only way for this to go is downwards and that was already evident at launch.
Some adjustments can be made to truly underpowered traits and skills, but they can only be brought to par with average core content, since anything beyond that will just buff elite specs even more.

Since we are now in the realm of discussing, which kind of skill is the best and whether having to make up for the shortcomings of your class is a matter of skill or merely the class being horrible in the first place, let me offer a different perspective on this.
The one skill that is consistent across all classes is the skill of being a good pvp player: Knowing, when to engage, when to run and when to stall, knowing, when to take risks and when to hold back, being able to navigate the map with ease and having efficient time management. It’s the kind of skill that allows a player to read the map perfectly, anticipate rotations and react accordingly.

Now with that, I will lean back and enjoy the fight between people who argue that piling up opportunity costs punish sloppy play on very mobile classes against people who argue that the ability to read the map and make good rotations becomes more important with low mobility classes, since you need to get moving sooner and it’s harder to make decisions.

grabs popcorn

What incentives are lacking?
On paper, there is a lot of incentives to buy HoT. The only people who are left are those who wouldn’t buy the expansion regardless of the content and conservatives, who really dislike the way, their game is heading and refuse to buy the expansion out of principle.

For me, the story itself would be enough reason to buy the game, but the lack of polish and quality clamps down on the product so hard, I can’t bring myself to buy it. I don’t want to incentivize Arena.net to become complacent or lazy. The HoT release showed a real lack of care about the quality of the game and I found it highly alarming.

What incentive does it make, when you blackmail the players into buying the game by devaluating their existing stuff? If the expansion was advertised as such, if the principle of the game was an endless grind for better gear and higher power levels, then obviously that wouldn’t be a problem, but the philosophy of Guild Wars 2 has always been one of vertical progression: When maxed out, everything will remain relevant and the only progress is in new play styles and new skins.
People were even concerned about that before the release of the game and thus, Arena.net proclaimed that elite specs won’t be any stronger than existing builds. And they said it at a point, where it should have been apparent to them, that elite specs will be monsters, that outclass anything in existence in general utility and in some cases will render core classes obsolete entirely.

drcraig.9403:

naphack.9346:

drcraig.9403:

I bought the core game at launch.

So did a lot of the people who are now complaining.

Care to elaborate? You’ve quoted a single sentence so I have no idea what context I should use to make sense of your post.

You stated that “free to play” people have no business complaining, yet as far as I know free to play people can’t post in the forum in the first place.

Also, a lot of people, I can’t speak for everyone here, don’t complain about not having access to HoT content, but rather about the appalling effort that went into balancing elite specializations.

A lot of people view the people who are complaining as spoiled brats, who aren’t loyal to the game. They act like we demand the HoT content for free.
From my experience, a lot of the complaining players are, like me, people, who really love the game and care about it. A lot of the people don’t complain out of spite, they complain out of concern for the health of the game, they love so deeply.
Let’s be frank here, the HoT release was a desaster, a lot of features were missing or bugged and because the release was rushed, they simply made the elite specs as awe-inspiring and phenomenal as possible, without any care for game balance. The basic formula was that as long as it has stunning graphics and impressive abilities, people will buy it.
Fast forward a couple months and we still see the problems with some of the design decisions that went into the elite specs. Some of those abilities are so over the top, they are really hard to balance in a reasonable way.
A lot of people see this and voice their concern, yet their only way to actually get through to Anet is to withhold buying HoT on principle until the quality of the content matches the price tag… Or the price tag matches the quality of the content, whichever changes first.

I mean, seriously, someone who didn’t love the game would have just walked away and given up on the game entirely after the desaster that was the HoT release.

But it’s no news that Anet has no clue, how to balance their own game. Just look at turret engis: There was a couple of builds that ran on celestial amulet and wrecked everything and a build that ran on sentinel amulet that wrecked those builds. Instead of just doing away with those tanky amulets, they chose to nerf turrets to the point of being unplayable and keeping the celestial builds in place. Then after the HoT release brought some truly degenerate builds like chrono bunkers, they finally caught on that having those kinds of extremely tanky amulets in pvp poses a problem… Instead of just removing them when turret engis ran rampant and fixing the problem that way.

drcraig.9403:

I bought the core game at launch.

So did a lot of the people who are now complaining.

Okay, maybe we need some more perspective on this:
I am not in the slightest angry that people without HOT don’t get any benefits from the guild hall, the new story, any story updates or any of the new PvE maps.
That’s all part of the expansion. I am also not really angry that people don’t get to play elite specs or Revenant in PvP… In principle. Whether those are available in PvP or not is up to Arena.net to decide and compelling arguments can be made for both sides of the discussion.
Where it breaks down for me is one simple principle: Arena.net promised that the new builds won’t be stronger than existing ones, but look at what they delivered. Elite specs aren’t simply new playstyles that differ from existing ones, they are a very powerful playstyle that eclipses a lot of the other viable builds.
And it often is not a power issue. Incidentally, I can think of a couple core builds that remain competitive up to a certain level even against elite builds. The problem is in the KIND of builds that remain competitive:
There is no way, with any core build whatsoever, to out-value an elite build. There is no way. It used to be celestial builds being the jack-of-all-trades, useful in every situation, kind of builds. Now it’s the elite builds.
The only viable core builds are pretty much all the same, either hardcore roaming dps machines or hardcore bunkers. I have yet to see a balanced build with good sustain against both damage sources, good damage output, some cc and team support. Those kinds of builds have been taken over by elite specs and there is no way to outperform them in general utility.
I can still wreck face with my greataxe warrior. It doesn’t work as great as it did during the initial chrono-bunker craze, since now the opponents actually fight back, but ultimately it performs like a slower thief with more staying power. It comes in for a quick +1, dishes out massive cleave damage in team fights and spends the rest of the match decapping empty points and running away from 1v1 fights.
The build itself is fine and perfporms well, just as the wide assortment of other builds, I have to choose from. But when I am at the beginning of a match, check the team composition and fight something lacking, there is nothing I can do.
Ultimately, even with 4 professions standing ready with a build, that on its own is totally fine in the current meta, all those builds differ very little, since all the group supporty stuff got relegated to HoT builds. My choice is basically whether I want to burst opponents down with glass canon a, glass canon b, glass canon c or glass canon d.
While certain builds may perform slightly better than others, none of those builds helps me, when I queue into a match and find my team have 2 dragonhunters and a thief.

Now why don’t I buy HoT? Partly because of financial reasons, but partly also on principle. We were promised a certain quality of product and HoT has yet to live up to that promise.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

Xillllix.3485:

They need to nerf condi and passive play, not Diamond Skin.

Bolded the crucial parts out…

rekt.

The sad part about diamond skin is that the elementalist is free to stand in the middle of the point without performing a single dodge.
He can just sit there, dish out dps rotation, keep regegenration up and heal from time to time, while any attack you do deals about 400 damage and makes 3-4 “immune” floaters pop up.
A condi build simply can’t hold a point in the current meta… With the possible exception of some condi ranger builds where the pet might provide enough combined power damage to tear down the diamond skin.

Guys, points clearly matter.
Which is why I always try to get ferocity even when there is a fight going on. Double or triple capping increases the sum of the personal scores within your team, which clearly is a good thing.
Also teleporting in just to tag a downed player and rushing the enemy treb are good ways to increase your personal score. Also I miss the canon on capricorn and I want Skyhammer back in ranked so I can boost my personal score some more.

On a more serious note, points say the most about a dedicated dps/roam character.
If your thief keeps running all over the map, jumping into random fights, yet only ends the game with 30 points, there is something wrong with that thief.
The thing that’s wrong is probably that he brought a thief to a bunker fight, but that’s another story.
Bottom line, any bunker will almost certainly end the game with a low score and any semi-bunker can, depending on play style and outcome, also end the game with a very low score despite doing all the heavy lifting for the team.

Doon.2364:

naphack.9346:

Why can’t you just leave warrior alone as a prime example of how the game should work and focus on tearing down the bullkitten that’s going on with the other classes?

You mean you want all classses’ gap closers to not work properly most of the time and easy to avoid? You mean u want all specialization to be unviable because your class is dependant on 2 main traits lines? You mean you want all classes’ attacks to be slow down to warrior’s speed so everyone can now interrupt or dodge your attacks? You mean you want all classes to have some bad traits that are useless? Cool!

I want all classes to have a consistent identity and a clear-cut definition on what the class can and can’t do.
Currently, every class other than thief and warrior has access to pretty much all the boons and conditions in spades They need to shave excess effects off all the abilities across the board to make the classes more streamlined again.

Why can’t you just leave warrior alone as a prime example of how the game should work and focus on tearing down the bullkitten that’s going on with the other classes?

Coyote.7031:

SirDrygan.1823:

I also sick of the constant “I can outrun a centaur”, “May Lyssa confound you.”….etc…can we just turn everything off? :P

Oh wait…we can….. it’s call Options -> Sound tab slide the slider to 0……

The one that gets me is on minion focused necromancer, “No I hand raised that minion!” When blowing up the little guys. Really? That’s what their for, shut it! On top of that hand raising implies more than “Here’s a corpse likes defile it to make critters!”

Which is why I love my Asura.
“I can always summon more!”

Morwath.9817:

I don’t know why Ranked isn’t disabled for non-HoT players, they are no better than people losing on purpose.

There is one flaw in your argumentation: The whole purpose of a league is to match players according to their skill, their ability and the soundness of their strategy.
So players who play core builds will be sorted out at the point where the differences between core builds and elite builds actually begin to matter.
Therefore anyone who complains about being matched with players who play “subpar builds” needs to look at their own performance with a “better build” instead of projecting their own inability onto others.

My best one up to date was “why do you [censored] play ranked when you don’t have elite specs? Arena.net should bar everyone who doesn’t have HoT from entering ranked!”

Like hell I will stop playing pvp after 3 years of guild wars 2 just because Arena.net decided to go full mental and break the balance of their own game in half by hiding the strongest specs behind a p2w wall.

We already have a map with a supposed anti-bunker mechanic.
It’s called skyhammer and it’s highly unpopular. Any map mechanic, that lays down direct damage and control effects on points will hit non-bunkers far harder than actual bunkers.

Buffs to anything would ruin the game.
We need blanket nerfs across all the elite specializations.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Some of the most blatant elite specs and revenants need to be toned down a bit.

A bit?
They need to be gutted completely for any core build to be viable again.
It’s not only the boons, it’s also the disgusting amount of free cc on group support skills or incidental cc that just happens for frankly doing nothing at all.
Remember, when you had to time your cc?

The most annoying one gotta be “I feel six feet tall!”
Mainly because no sane Asura would use such an inferior unit of measurement.

Build wall, deport elite specs, make GW2 great again!

Was struggling getting through Emerald.
Cutting through Sapphire like a hot knife through butter.

I can confirm these observations.

And I’m playing a greataxe warrior.

Elementalist: Celestial Staff is solid.
D/D can work if you are good.

Warrior: Greataxe wrecks faces.
GS/Hammer is outclassed by any cc in the HoT meta. You throw out slow stuns, they throw out instant cast stuns with bigger AoE that double as team support.

Guard: Burn Guard probably is too squishy and there is a lot of condi remove in the meta.
Bunker Guard can be seen as a weaker Bunker Chrono of some sorts.

Warrior is fine.
Stop power creep and nerf other classes instead.

Burn Guard is horrible in the current meta. You will be up against classes that pack the same offensive potential but can bring far more defensive skills.

As for builds that work in the current meta:
Signet Necro (more of a meta call than strong on its own merit. The amount of corruption and boon strips at your disposal match up well against tempests and revenants)
Celestial Staff Ele (probably the most versatile and most reliable non-HoT build, but the sustain certainly isn’t as smooth as the sustain of a tempest)
Greataxe Warrior (wrecks faces incredibly fast)

Builds, you can make work if you are really good at the class:
S/D Thief (As there is hardly any thieves in the meta, this build will be able to out-rotate anything the opponents can field)
Soldier Rifle Engi (I simply can’t make it work but that’s simply down to me being a horrible engi player)

A lot of these builds are still tuned to the old meta and would need some adjustments.

As for the list: Celestial staff is not “if you can’t play d/d”.
In the current meta, celestial staff is far stronger than d/d because it has far better group support. The advantage in offensive strength, d/d has to offer isn’t really all that strong when you consider, it has to measure up to revenant auto attacks and dragonhunter traps.

GS/Hammer simply can’t compete with the cc that’s currently around because it has ONLY cc, while any cc in the current meta is just as strong while having group support, instant cast and large AoE tacked on. It’s just silly to bring a cc focused build to a meta, where cc happens incidentally.
I found shoutbow to be really lackluster.
Add Greataxe to the list of warrior builds. It wrecks faces.

As you stated, Ranger is a horrible choice for non-HoT builds.

A friend of mine is currently tinkering with a boon corruption based carrion signet necromancer. It just eats tempests and revenants alive. Maybe once the testing is done, I will post it here.

my asura war certainly loves to kneecap people with a greataxe build.
Just because other people like to pay to win doesn’t mean, playing HoT specs is the only way to win games.

Warrior is in a good place. You need skill and timing to land your skills and any defensive skills have a huge trade off.
It’s the other classes that need to be nerfed.

You can always have it in your inventory and link it in map chat when someone is salty about being owned.

Regarding mmr tanking:
How about you just play stock GW2 warrior and try your best?
According to Arena.net, the game is balanced and normal specs are just as viable as elite specs, right?
As for me, I’ve been having a blast lately just chopping opponents to bits with a greataxe warrior. My advice for anyone who feels the need to drop their mmr is: Just stop caring and enjoy yourself for a while. There’s some profession specific achievements, you could shoot for, right?
Once you get back to your regular build, I’m sure, you will miraculously manage to zoom through the divisions and that effect will obviously be down to you being more relaxed after enjoying yourself for a bit.

There’s some even more weird things going on with dual skills.
Unload with dual quip creates all the special effects at the main hand pistol.
The unload projectiles of both pistols are determined by the main hand.

Shadow shot uses the normal pistol animation and sound even if your offhand is legendary.

Pistol whip? Well… I never expected any special animations.

The thing is, skill 3 is considered to be part of the main hand weapon, even though with thief, that’s not exactly true.

Ohoni.6057:

We all play GW2 for different reasons, and your take is that titles and visuals are different things, but they represent goals and prestige as they are the reward after doing content.

They do, but skins also change the appearance of your character, something which titles do not do. You can’t even see your own title unless you open the hero panel. You can argue that they have some things in common, but they are far more different than they are the same, and usually the point is only raised as a straw man argument. I do not believe that I have yet heard from someone who passionately believed that titles were just as important as skins, it’s mostly just people going “well what if they were?” so they could go on to shoot down proposals to make skins more available to a broader range of players.

Ultimately I just don’t care. More titles, less titles, whatever, I’m not bothered either way, it has nothing to do with skins.

just hold CTRL and you actually do see your own title.

Playing against dh is fairly easy: See DH in team fight?
call target on DH, pop protection for your team, jump in and cc chain. One dead DH.
If there is a DH, everyone stops what they are doing and spends 5 seconds to kick him in the nuts really hard. The spec is made of glass, has almost no defensive skills and folds to any kind of pressure.
A bunker heavy lineup vs 3 dragonhunters is a guaranteed victory.

I just don’t get why they didn’t seed players with high mmr in a higher division at the start of the season.
Would it be so hard to just set cut-off points and seed players according to their mmr?
Would get around a lot of the troubles, people face right now.

What are you even talking about?

The previous leaderboard only had players that could play 24/7.
The current system is an attempt to make it more accessible to highly skilled players that don’t have a lot of time. I don’t think, it’s a successful attempt, but the idea counts, right?

The first 2 tiers are gated behind 15-day intervals.
The final 2 tiers have an achievement instead that requires you to get a ton of top player awards from what I can tell. (my bunker ele will enjoy these ones for sure)

It’s made in such a way that people who play an awful lot and are really good at the game can complete the item during one season. Your question has already been answered by a red post somewhere in this forum: The meta achievement is not specific to this particular ranked season. Instead, it will apply to all pvp seasons of the coming year, so people will have 4-5 seasons to complete their ascension.

Now there is one flaw, I’d like to point out: The number of required division advances increases. Tier 2 requires you to advance by 2 divisions and so no. Someone, who will never get better than diamond but plays so much, he reaches diamond during the first 15 days will have a hard time making the 2 division advances required for the next meta achievement in that same season. But next season he will probably be able to complete 2 or even the remaining 3 meta achievements.
I really do hope, those work retroactive during a season, but I am afraid, they do not.
So maybe the conclusion about someone who plays an awful lot being able to get it during one season is wrong. Maybe it needs to be someone who plays just enough to keep advancing the meta achievement.

On the other hand, someone who competes at the very top tier will probably have no problems finishing it in one season.

You know what this reminds me of?
Pure WvW players complaining that they have to do PvE to get a legendary weapon.

I for one am happy that there is finally something for a PvP player to work towards. It used to be that in order to get some PvE content through PvP, you had to put in 20 times the effort and get lucky on top of it. Before that, there wasn’t even any PvE content, you could get through PvP as PvP used its own item system.

Here’s the thing: If they ever made those wings available through PvE, it would take 5% of the time to get them, everyone would have them without having to put in any effort. That’s just how PvE is. Meanwhile, those who want to get the wings through PvP would still have to grind for them over multiple PvP seasons to finally get their hands on something, the PvE population basically got for free.

That’s the whole reason, it’s a PvP exclusive item in the first place: People are tired of grinding their kitten off to get something, a PvE player basically gets handed out for free. Additionally, there’s items, you can not even get through PvP and only through running fractals(fractal reward track plx). I think, fractals are inherently not fun and running through the same fractal with whatever small gimmick arena.net came up with to alter the fractal a bit for the hundredth time is a meaningless activity.
Yet if you want certain items, you HAVE to do it. And there is no other way to get those specific items.

So now, at last, PvP players have something exclusive, something they can work for without it being handed out for free to non-PvP players and something that is actually a reasonable goal to work towards.
If I want a legendary, I will either have to grind through a dungeon reward track for weeks or I will have to swallow my pride and go to the dungeon to do some explo. For my dreamer, reward tracks weren’t even on the table yet. Did I complain? No. I took my thief to twilight arbor, gathered some guild mates and did the kitten thing.
The first couple runs were refreshing and the last ones were mind-numbingly boring, but I sat through it, got my gift of thorns and completed my dreamer.

There is a lot of content that’s locked behind certain types of activities not everyone enjoys. there is also a lot of content that’s exclusive to exactly one type of activity, yet nobody bats an eyebrow that they need to die of boredom while doing fractals in order to finally get their hands on ad infinitum.
I for one certainly won’t work towards that one at all because fractals are dreadfully boring. Your mileage may vary and that’s cool with me. Shoot for the stars.
Just please don’t freak out just because one specific item is locked behind something, you regard a dull, repetitive activity. Every single item is locked behind dull, repetitive activities to some people. Those people then just choose, not to work towards those specific items.