Guild Wars 2

I really wanted GW2 to work as an e-sport, but I was always skeptical about how enjoyable conquest would be to watch. I was pretty involved in watching and playing paid tournaments, and really tried to make it work, but ultimately I had to admit that I really don’t like playing or watching conquest mode.

I don’t like the play it encourages (map control is very strait forward with 3 identical points that have no strategic impact beyond generating points, standing in circles limits the impact of positioning and creative use of terrain in fights, you play to run down the clock instead of playing to achieve a final goal etc.), and from a viewers perspective the game type has no rising action or climax.

The most popular e-sport games right now (mobas and RTS) tell a story, where players gain small advantages until a climax is reached and a winner is determined. Even in fighting games there are often special meters that build up and increase the intensity of the combat as fights progress and special combos are unlocked. Intensity also increases as players get closer to death, which is an intuitive, visceral endpoint. 500 points is not an intuitive endpoint, and it doesn’t come in a moment of climax.

The problem is there’s a disconnect between the exciting moment of accomplishing something (capturing a point/wiping a team) and the scoring moments that get you closer to victory (sitting on a point/staying alive/waiting) that makes the game less exciting to watch. The most exciting endings I have had in GW2 were guild lord rushes on foefire, and I attribute that mostly to the fact that you accomplish something significant in the moment of victory, instead of taking point control and then winning 10 minutes later.

if you’re really trying to win and there’s a nearby point that you can neutralize or cap that’s what you should do. a capped node will generate as many points as a kill in a very short amount of time, and neutralizing a node will deny that same amount of points to the enemy.

reasonable excuses for chasing the thief:

1. he appears to be running toward an undefended point you own
2. he is running toward an undefended point they own and you were going that way anyway
3. he is running toward an area that is safe for you (like toward your base on foefire) and you don’t want to go for the cap because you see (or sense) enemies coming to defend and don’t want to get caught alone
4. you’re in an 8v8 and you feel like it

vain this thread isn’t about burst being uncounterable, it’s about burst being implemented in a way that isn’t fun. particularly for new players, but if GW2 followed the guidelines in the OP the game would probably be more fun at all skill levels.

it’s just intuitively logical that big, potentially game-ending hits should require some degree of buildup before they become available/practical to land. as a general rule the bigger the hit the more cast time/setup the skill should have. the game would just feel better if this were true more often.

totally agree with the OP. all his comparisons have merit. GW2 isn’t a fighting game but the same principles apply, pacing is very important in mmo pvp. you want fights to feel like there’s some build up, and they don’t end immediately or drag on forever. ideally you posture some, you poke, you try to figure out the opponents weaknesses, and then when you’re set up you try to throw your combo, or exploit an opening in the opponents defense to go for the finish. group fights in mmos should strive for that same balance as well as 1v1’s.

it is a very real problem that many professions in GW2 can burst with little setup required and few visual tells or windup to indicate they are coming. burst should require set up or window of opportunity to land, and it should have obvious visual tells to indicate that it’s coming for new players.

I mean… you have two other skills, but it’s so blatantly obvious when and how most of them should be used that they hardly count.

Rubbers.5261:

Main Points from players as of why not many play SPVP anymore:

-There’s no ranking system for s/tpvp so most people don’t really see a point in playing.

-Lack of any other game mode than “capture the point”

-Lack of support for sPvP from ANet, lack of features for competitive play. People who like sPvP are discouraged to put their effort in it, considering it’s been 3+ months and compared to PvE, sPvP got nothing.

-Strict segregation of PvE and sPvP. I know it sounds pedantic, but I’d sPvP a hell of a lot more if I could simply carry over my gears appearance in PvE to sPvP. The stats should be completely seperate and set at an equal level for sPvp (as they currently are), I just dislike that ALL PvE effort for armor and weapon skins is completely wasted.
The sPvP is too far detatched from the real game and you cant bring the rewards outside of the tiny pvp-world.

-Lack or proper matchmaking. Glory is a stupid grind and is completely unrelated to skill.

I think those are exactly the main reasons.

Clark Skinner.4902:

When both are downed, I find that really interesting.

Really? You actually like sitting there pressing 1 for 20 seconds?

I don’t find being in downed state fun at all because it’s just a dumbed down version of normal fighting with all your options stripped away. I’d rather just watch the fight than press 1 over and over.

I don’t hate the downed state, but I don’t feel like it was designed for PvP. Just the way the whole system works (especially rallying from kills) seems like it was meant to make solo PvE more enjoyable, since you can feel the effects of almost dieing without actually having any repercussions or feeling like you lost, and then PvP was designed around the PvE mechanic. It feels like the only reason it exists in the first place is because of PvE, not because it is an improvement to PvP.

Other things that I think are anti-fun in PvP:

-glass/teamfight/bunker trinity is much less dynamic and interesting than the usual dps/control/healer meta in most mmos. Without healers positioning, target aquisition, and spike timing are all diminished in importance, and those are 3 of the primary things that give mmo pvp depth.
-Conquest sucks
-Visual noise from mesmer clones. Mesmer clones make teamfights look like clusterkittens.
-Too many skills that deal damage while simultaneously making you immune/evade/stealth and/or working as a gap closer
-Too many aoe skills
-Not enough really situational skills that are either amazing or useless depending on when you choose to use them
-Very few skills or situations that would encourage you to use crowd control on a target other than the one you’re damaging (like counter-spell the priest while killing the rogue)
-Conquest sucks
-The range of stat specialization possible is too wide. Glass cannons are too glassy, tanks are too tanky, and there is very little incentive to go “balanced” stats.

i haven’t played in a few weeks but rangers were probably the best 1v1 profession before the patch. it’s not surprising that a few small tweaks could change people’s perception greatly.

There were some cool things you could do with skill swapping, but ultimately this is a necessary change. The people who can’t see the good in it are being really shortsighted.

..And clicking through windows, however intelligently you might be doing it… is not really that leet or fun. If skill swapping during a match is the epitome of gw2 skill this game is beyond hope.

Powerr.3649:

No more swapping to scorpion wire on the run to clutch pull an enemy stomping a teammate

No more swapping to flash to teleport body block a kill shot

No more swapping to ice bow to quickly down the treb, instead now enemies can respawn and run back after tough 1v1s before the treb dies

No more getting additional condition cleanse because you are fighting a caltrops thief with 30 second duration bleeds

Slower mobility in the long run means less engagements, and more snowball effect.

But what do I know about competitive pvp and what adds and diminishes skill. I guess i’m not considering the casuals who have just as much reason to be here as myself. This is just frustrating, nothing people won’t be able to get over, but frustrating. Some people spent loads of time thinking of how to #nextlevel

You can still do all that stuff, you just can’t do all of it in one build. This is about build diversity. It’s hard to get people to play a variety of builds when you can cherry pick the best elements from any build and use them all at once.

Ezrael.6859:

I think the thing that makes LoL popular to watch is that every match is a build up in terms of power and escalation of the map all heading for the finish.

It’s like a story where a character starts weak, trains to gain more power and is finally able to overcome his enemy at the end.

When you watch LoL you are watching for small good plays at first and to see who might get an advantage or take a lead.

You’re waiting for the big plays at the end and it’s all building up to the final rush to destroy the base.

It starts slow and it builds up and up in power and speed, an escalating story that finishes very quickly.

But, with a chance for the enemy team to turn it around near the end, it doesn’t happen too often but there is always a chance.

The take and hold of 3 bases doesn’t have any kind of momentum like this.

Essentially you both hold your home point and fight over a mid point, the one that holds the mid point the longest wins.
This is generally achieved with about 2 big fights at mid, the winner normally of 2 big fights normally having enough of an advantage to then just bunker down and hold on to the end.

GW2 doesn’t speed up and escalate all the way to the end for a fantastic finish, infact at the end it feels like it slows down, becomes cautious and safe. Like the slow steady Turtle racing the Rabbit.

The most popular CS map was the de_ (defuse maps) this also works in the same principle as the escalating story.

You start off with how people deploy and tactics, people take a few shots at each other and try to gain an early advantage. At some point the Terrorists rush to get the bomb down (full escalation of the story) and then it’s up to the CTs to finish them and defuse it in time. There are chances for last stands, turn arounds or all out destruction.

Now of course an FPS plays a little differently with the way one can kill 5 much easier, and no respawns.
But, the way the maps escalate and build up to an intense finish is what makes it fun to watch.

While GW2 remains in a state of bunkers to hold points safely and a game type of both hold 1 point, fight over the middle it will always be too cautious, this gametype promotes a cautious approach.

You watch people in sPvP try to take 3 points and leave the others wide open, it’s more active and exciting to play and watch but it’s a bad strategy because you get backcapped.

The way to win 3 point take and hold is to take 2 points and sit on them for as long as possible, playing defensively. (Boring to watch). An anti-climax.

If anything, Temple could be the most fun map to watch as the steady nature of 3 point take and hold, the current meta and the way the scores generally go up equally with a slowly increasing advantage held by the team that wins the few group fights can all be turned on it’s head by the buff that spawns to allow one team to claim all 3 points.
However, the problem is that if the enemy team is just safely bunkering those points like the gametype dictates that they should to win they will just neutralise them about 4 seconds later because they are already standing on them.

Take and hold 3 points will probably never end up as an exciting thing to watch because there’s no build up, no sprint to the finish.

I agree with all that; conquest is anti-climactic. Instead of being awarded points and/or victory upon completion of a goal like most games, you’re awarded points gradually based on the current situation. There is no final objective to bring to completion, or really big scoring moments for people to stand up and scream GOALLLLL.

Instead of winning/scoring when you accomplish something significant like wiping out the other team, scoring a goal in soccer, diffusing the bomb, or capturing a flag, you accumulate points gradually by maintaining a slight advantage until your score reaches an arbitrary number and the game abruptly ends.

It is a game mode that encourages you to play to run out the clock. You win by taking a small advantage and holding it. Games like starcraft and mobas reward players for taking small advantages as well, but 1. you need to continue to accumulate small advantages throughout the game, and 2. you eventually need to use those small advantages to accomplish something more significant. Conquest has no second phase, you just get an early advantage at the start and then you sit on it while the other team runs out of time. It’s a very boring narrative.

i hate conquest. 3v3 is not my favorite but i’d take anything that’s not conquest at this point.

conquest doesn’t get played in high level fps tournaments because the mode has little strategic depth. it’s boring.

there is no other way to duel besides using one of the hotjoin servers and agreeing as a community. there’s really nothing wrong with that. why don’t you just start a not-dueling-5v5-server?

5v5 is too small for hotjoin. players go in and out in hotjoin, and in a 5v5 you really feel the loss of a single player. they just need a solo queue single match rated 5v5.

duel servers are fine.

Esrever.8613:

I would like a game mode where all you do is stand in rectangles.

how about an underwater map where you float in cubes?

Arenanet was right when they decided “having one primary game mode makes a better platform for e-sports” because the entire community, casual and hardcore, are playing the same game type and more players that can relate to what’s going on in a tournament means more interest and viewers. They just got it totally wrong when they picked conquest.

They needed something really awesome with a lot of depth, and conquest mode is not that. It could be something more complex like dota or GvG or some completely original game type, but even strait up 3v3 arena has more depth than conquest imo. Lots of games have had a conquest game type, but I don’t know of a single one that has used it for tournaments and been remotely successful as an e-sport.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

The new rank levels and skins to go with it are cool, but at every 10 levels being the barrier to the new skin type and new rank, once you get higher levels, ranks 1-9 of thise levels get extremely Grindy, with very long waits in between. At 45k glory per rank and only milestones every 10th rank, it becomes more of a chore to rank up, I love pvping in the mean time, but the grind for ranks gets ridiculous. People will say you love the pvp so the ranks will come without you noticing or blah blah, but when you hit rank 30/40 and look ahead to the next rank it’s more like kitten I have to do double the amount for the next rank, it becomes more daunting than fun.

Exactly.

The way the current reward system works by the time you hit 30 you have enough glory to get all the rank 30-39 gear at once. You get about an hour or two of pleasure while you open 80 gold boxes full of new stuff, get every item you want in one day, and then you know you’re not getting anything new for the next month or two while you creep toward 40. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could actually look forward to each rank instead of only the 10’s mattering, but I think for most player by the time they hit 30 or 40 all the future milestones either feel meaningless or unattainable and they lose any motivation to progress.

They need to reevaluate the rank curve as a whole, and change they method of distribution so that you unlock new stuff at each rank. The rank curve should increase gradually instead of plateauing every 10 levels, and your rewards should be distributed the same way.

Also they need to make it so you don’t get spammed with so many duplicate items. Scarcity creates demand, and right now you get spammed with so much stuff you don’t want (much less need) that it all starts to look like trash.

I’ve been slowly coming to the realization that conquest mode just doesn’t do it for me. I don’t really like playing it, and it’s not fun to watch for very long. I’ve also never seen conquest picked as the game mode for any semi-popular esport (thinking about FPS games where conquest is one of the modes, it’s never picked for tournaments except maybe tf2, which as far as I can tell is regarded as an e-sport faliure)

I think gw2 needs a different game type as the primary competitive mode, and a ladder, and a reward system that’s more engaging (mostly it just needs to give desirable rewards at more regular intervals, rather than overloading you with junk items and only unlocking new stuff every 10 ranks while individual ranks are useless and quickly become very very time consuming to reach). The sense of achievement, progression and reward fulfillment is not there; for new players or competitive players.

what’s wrong with bunker builds exactly?

I like the impact res skills have on the game, it’s much better than the clump up and press F revive meta. They’re some of the few support skills in the game that actually feel clutch and intentional when you use them, rather than happening accidentally as part of your dps rotation. They also force teams to react to the enemy, adapt their play based on available reses, and encourage communication to avoid overlapping revives, or missing because of a downed state teleport/mistform. It’s also one of a very small number of skills that actually encourage you to use CC situationally on an enemy other than your DPS target or the players baltantly standing there trying stomp/revive. There’s not enough of that in GW2 as is.

Some of them just need some tweaks. Like they all need more obvious casting animations, especially the necro signet, so it’s more apparent when you need to interrupt, and mesmer res needs a cast time or the revived player needs to go strait to defeated after the revive or something. The ele and warrior revives are mostly fine I think.

1. Most of the best TPvP builds are also strong 1v1 if played well, but that isn’t their primary purpose. A build that is only good 1v1, but brings low damage and no support to a team fight is probably not versatile enough to fit in a tournament comp. Being able to reliably win a 1v1 against almost any matchup is useful, because it forces teams to overcompensate for you, but if you instantly die when it becomes 1v2 or are dead weight when a fight escalates to a 2v2 then it’s not really accomplishing much in the long run.

2. Yes. 2 Bunkers is not even good. You want 1 bunker and some support, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a “support” build on your team, it’s not like you need healing, so you just bring a dps ele and necro that also provide good support with aoe heals, CC, condi removal and resurrection. The ele could be semi tanky, but it could also be glass and still do all that.

3. If you aren’t gearing for support it hardly feels right to call a build a “support build”. But like I said, eles, necros and mesmers all bring a lot of utility to the team even in their damage builds. I think the danger of setting out to make a “support build” is that you might sacrifice damage when it’s not really necessary, you can be a damage dealer and provide some support at the same time.

4. Hm.. horribly wrong imo. Most US teams only run 1 condi and 2-3 power, and that condi is usually a carrion necro, so condi/power hybrid really. Euros like engineers, but I never see them played here. They have a different playstyle.

5. Bunker guardian mid, shatter mesmer back point, turret condi necro for teamfight pressure/support, dagger/dagger ele for roaming dmg/control/support (can be glass or tanky dps), and thief or warrior as glass cannon primary damage dealer.

Purely anecdotal evidence, and possibly unrelated, but for me this always seems to happen when I am spamming hotkeys as I res. More specifically it seems to be hotkeys that open a menu/window like opening my inventory, or checking the scoreboard.

I don’t normally spam to try to open my bag, or open the scoreboard as I’m loading, since I have plenty of time to do that while I’m running back to the fight, but when my adrenaline gets going sometimes I’ll be tapping V or B (bags and score hotkeys) while loading and that always seems to be when I get the endless load screen.

Just sayin.

you could do like I do and leave whenever the rotation gets to capricorn.

Really glad they bumped match making and ranking up the priority list.

I think the question should be viewed as “which profession is the most difficult to play to it’s fullest potential”, or possibly “which is most difficult to play at a moderate level”. But definitely not “which is the hardest to achieve good results with” because that’s basically just an inverse list of “which profession is the best” which we have seen answered a million times.

I suggested the exact same thing a while back. It makes sense to me as well, just because in broad terms the way team compositions break down looks like this:

Guardian and Ele compete for the bunker/support position
Thief and Warrior compete for glass cannon/roamer
Necro and Engi compete for ranged team fight condition pressure
Mesmer is close point defender because portal allows it to watch a point while being present in other fights on the map
Ranger is amazing 1v1 but can’t compete for the position of close point defender because it has no portal

If rangers could assist mid/boss kills and still teleport back to defend close point they could compete with mesmer for back point defender. I think there’s a chance they might even steal the role entirely, because imo ranger is the best 1v1 in the game. Of course mesmer portal can move multiple people so it still has additional utility the ranger wouldn’t have access to.

Necros are very good. Extremely good ranged aoe pressure and some nice team fight support.

Been dueling a lot lately and the same build (different utilities/runes) also seems to be one of the best 1v1 builds out there. At least with flesh golem.

I’m not sure about the first question, but the answer to the second question is that it spreads the duration remaining (2 sec in your example). Any immobilize you do spread isn’t going to last very long by the time you finish casting epidemic.

I just think the core reason mobas work is because of leveling and getting gear over the course of the game. Partially the psychology of it, there’s something fun about leveling up and getting stuff and trying to farm, but also because leveling and farming gold are the mechanics that drive map movement. Like the reason people don’t just 5 man push mid is because you miss all the XP and farm from the other lanes etc. For it to work in GW2 without levels and XP it would basically have to be a completely new game type.

Plague.5329:

Also, in terms of PvP being isolated, as you have all your progress effectively removed when you PvP (aside from dyes, which don’t even work in matches), there’s no incentives to participate. If you invest hours into PvE and are told to start over in PvP, you get a floating sense of separation from your own character, who now feels like a completely different person from that one you’ve been developing. Consequently, this detachment discourages people from bothering at all.

The fact that even cosmetic stuff doesn’t transfer between PvE and PvP does make it feel like you’re starting an alt if you do a lot of PvP on a character and then try PvE or vice versa. It doesn’t feel like the same character at all.

I wish there were totally different skins for PvP armor and PvE armor, but you could wear PvP skins in PvE and vice versa. That way you could show off your accomplishments from other parts of the game, and people would still know “he got that helm from X Dungeon” or “he got that for being rank 30” or whatever whether you were currently doing PvE or PvP or WvW.

They should also have put a lot more thought into the way rewards are given out. The way you get tons of boxes full of random items is reward overload. It desensitizes you to the enjoyment of getting a new gold box, or piece of gear, when you are constantly flooded with items that you don’t want and throw away. They should have designed a reward system that gave boxes/items far less frequently, but didn’t give duplicates nearly as often.

BlueprintLFE.2358:

Rallying provides options for teams. If one of your teammates goes down you have to make a quick command decision on whether to try and rez him or kill the enemy to rally him. Without rally’s you would be stuck in defensive mode when a teammate goes down, you would have to Rez, either stealth, or stability. As of now rallying gives a choice to push on offensively, or defensively revive, sometimes it’s not always practical to revive.

Well that’s how it is in other games too, but in choosing to push offensively you’re choosing to leave your player to the wolves, whereas in GW2 for some reason you can kill two birds with one stone and save someone by spamming damage. I just think the concept of killing an enemy to revive your ally is counter intuitive. I’d rather see more effective support skills to keep players standing, and revive skills on shorter cooldowns to bolster out the support role. Support is kind of cheapened when you can revive allies with DPS ya know? Imo it makes different build roles less distinct, which ultimately makes the playing field less diverse and interesting.

The other problem with rallying is that, in a normal game when a fight is close and both teams choose to go offensive to drop a player a 3v3 becomes a 2v2 etc. This almost never happens in GW2 because a 3v3 where 2 players go down around the same time automatically becomes a 3v2 when one side rallys, and that 3v2 quickly becomes a 3v0 landslide victory. If rallying didn’t exist we might actually see some really close 3v3s become 2v2s and then 1v1s etc and remain nail-biters too the end.

the concept of rallying doesn’t feel like a PvP mechanic, it feels like something that was designed completely with solo PvE in mind and then forced into PvP for no particularly good reason.

Creecher (nurt.5401) – Afternoon-Late EST

Add me and hit me up if you want to 1v1. I can possibly fraps if desired.

There are so many reasons the conclusions in this thread are fundamentally dumb, but I’ll just point out a few completely overlooked factors: The most popular necro build right now (US anyway) doesn’t use a stun break utility, so plague is your only stun break. It’s also your only way to safely/reliably get a stomp off. You’re playing a fragile aoe nuker that wants to go unnoticed and bomb fights; when you do get caught having an extra “oh kitten” button to stall for your heal cooldown, or a guardian book, can be invaluable.

Boloth.6879:

While it’s true hundred blades can be avoided that’s not what the OP is upset about.

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/counter-play

I’ve always thought the main reason the game was more enjoyable during the beta weekends was the fact that the developers had counter-play in the forefront of their minds when they were designing warriors and elementalists, and those were the most powerful/popular professions at the time.

Thieves and mesmers, which were finalized later in the process when ideas were getting stretched thin, time was running out, etc. do not provide as many opportunities for counter play. They have less visual tells in their animations, burst combos that are more difficult to avoid or interrupt, frequently used skills that do high burst damage while simultaneously being a gap closer or providing evasion/immunity, more frustrating mechanics like stealth and clone spam etc. All of which reduce the number of viable/interesting counters the opponent can employ.

Lack of thought provoking reactive play is a big problem in GW2, but I actually think Warrior for the most part is one of the better designed classes in that regard.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

People building parties are usually looking for specific characters and builds to fill out the party, and if you don’t match what they’re looking for you don’t get an invite.

Every time I see something like this I just wonder what’s stopping you from starting a group of your own? Obviously it’s more convenient to fall into a solid group of 4 as the last member, but you’ve gotta get lucky for that to happen. If you’re having trouble finding a group you should take the initiative and start inviting people yourself.

There is nothing. I don’t really know why rank points required to rank up scales higher and higher while the glory cost of boxes stays the same every level. You get glory and rank points at the same rate, why are you paying the same amount of glory for a tiger box as you did for rabbit? A rank 40 box should cost like 1000/5000/10000 glory or something. In the current system you just get a ton of excess glory.

felivear.1536:

This is the logical first step before adding a suicide button. Many of the early complaints were that if you added a suicide button people would just release right before the wave timer.
Also, many of the complaints of the bleeding out time + rez time can be quelled with a suicide button.

This seems like the best solution to me. A 5th skill that sends you strait to the defeated state, or the option to release and respawn directly from the downed state.

The idea of res timers that scale down based on how long you were in downed state is a creative idea but I don’t think it’s the best solution.

1. It directly rewards players for hanging around and being a nuisance by throwing rocks at people for 20 seconds. I don’t think that’s something that deserves a special reward (outside of whatever you accomplish), and I don’t think teams should be punished for not stomping immediately in the middle of a big fight. The natural course of action for a downed player with no hope of being revived/rallying should be to respawn and rejoin the fight as soon as possible, because fighting standing up is more fun than sitting down.

2. If a player lives for more than the max respawn timer they are back in a position where the other team should just let them slowly bleed out and it’s in their best interest to die quickly but they have no way to do so. It’s the same problem that exists now. It would just happen less frequently but it would also be even more of an awkward “gaming the system” situation when it did happen.

3. New players probably wouldn’t intuitively understand why their spawn timer is always different.

imo positioning, movement and using the terrain to your advantage are big parts of why mmo combat is fun and rewarding, and when you’re forced to stand in a circle to get points it limits what you can do with regards to that stuff. That’s my biggest gripe with conquest compared to CTF or arena combat.

Target selection is a big part of mmo combat as well, and conquest encourages teams to run bunkers, which by their nature aren’t viable targets, which again just limits your options.

Also, among organized teams the optimal strategy in almost any conquest game mode is to take a slight advantage and then hold it and run down the clock, which isn’t a very exciting way to play. Watching points tick gradually is less exciting (usually) than getting a clutch flag return or cap.

GW2 conquest is very good for a conquest game type IMO (probably because of the secondary objectives), but that doesn’t change the fact that conquest has never been my favorite game type to begin with.

Rythgar.2896:

I have been thinking about this quite some. I can’t really wrap my head around how this will be done. Will we get a set, individual ress timer now? Kind of the only balanced way I can see.

Yes, that’s what it means. Your spawn timer is individual, so it’s a set number that starts when you die.

I imagine the timer will be around 10-15 seconds to split the difference between the previous min and max timer you could get.

i’m US and on a team, but just out of curiosity and for other people’s benefit: what’s your team name/who are your players.

also free bump.

I have to agree with the OP. It doesn’t need to be a super grind, but between doing a couple SPvP matches to check out the new map and see how 5v5 servers were going, and then a night of paid tourneys with the team, I accidentally completed the monthly achievement in one night of casually playing the game. Doesn’t give me much to achieve for the rest of the month.

Imo keep the tourney wins low so anyone could do it, but if it’s supposed to be a once a month thing the kills/glory/match wins should all be quite a bit higher.

Rangers should get more play in high level TPvP after this patch. People are trying them out right now and I think they’re going to find their place.

The change with the biggest impact on the meta is probably going to be the change to downed state health.

Relentliss.2170:

Lol has a hundred characters and there are some that are used mostly by the pro’s and others that seem to favour pub’s. This makes balancing a bit easier for them. They can balance some characters for nub use and others for pro. Gw2 does not have this luxury.

The same thing could happen with builds in GW2 eventually. Problem is there is no “high skill cap” thief build that outshines the easy to play/solo friendly pub stomping builds in the hands of a good player.

Thieves are fairly high skillcap in some ways, but there isn’t a “pro build” that emphasizes the difficult aspects of the thief over the easy aspects. Since for now pros and noobs play the same build it’s impossible to balance them independently.

milo.6942:

nurt.5401:

Rangers […] are already one of the best 1v1 professions (if not the best)

Why do you say this?

Because with the right build it’s true?

Demon.7832:

ilJumperMT.4871:

Rangers are still a joke

This

Eles and Necros have continuosly been getting their buffs and are now working great in TPvP, Rangers still don’t really have a place

^I think it’s too early to call whether that’s true. Rangers didn’t get much in the way of buffs, but they are already one of the best 1v1 professions (if not the best), and they’re also the only profession that has access to such a short cooldown on demand quickness for stomps and revives.

It’s not that rangers are terrible, they just don’t quite fit into the meta. Guardian and Ele bunkers are nerfed, thieves are nerfed, and possibly most importantly, longer portal cooldown + phantasm nerfs mean mesmers may not be as reliable for holding the back point. Imo if it weren’t for the strength of portal rangers might be a contender for that position.

Once the metagame adapts to these changes rangers should at least find themselves in a better position relative to the rest of the field, since no professions got a significant buff as far as I noticed.

I agree with the OP.

Using server browser hot-join PvP as the primary game mode feels like a relic from the past. Almost every successful competitive game of the last 6 years or so has been built on automated matchmaking and usually a performance based ladder to rank players and let people track their progress.

I’m not really sure what advantage they saw in this system. Someone must have been wearing some rose colored nostalgia glasses or something.

aaron.7850:

Im really surprised they didnt change thieves, they lowered the damage on abilities that didnt bother me at all as the victim.

If the damage from dancing dagger didn’t bother you you weren’t paying close enough attention or you only ever fought thieves 1v1.

just gonna sword auto attack spam.