Guild Wars 2

Savoy.6824:

Have you read this yet Devon?

“After a careful reevaluation of orbs of power we have decided to remove them from WvW in an upcoming build. As implemented, orbs tend to strengthen teams who are already winning and make it even more difficult for underdog teams to fight back”

This was posted by Habib Loew.6239, one of your own designers.

Posting any suggestions to these forums is an utterly useless waste of time. As long as new WvWvW crew has been in charge, they have always implemented the opposite of what the majority of the player base wants, disregarding of also what has been stated before by Arenanet. See:

Since Autumn players complained about Arrow Cars able to shoot into locations they shouldn’t —> Arenanet massively buffs their damage and adds overpowered WXP traits
(the Arenanet devs originally said “small changes and small steps at time”, now we can see is surely wasn’t the case. More than doubling the damage and area in just one patch)

Players have been been begging for account bound commander tags and WXP —> not going to happen (“Guild Wars 2 will not require you to grind and everybody can fight in level ground” LOL… now imagine the time to level up WXP for 7 different alts to give them just max ranks in guard killer and defense against guards, not to mention all those other WXP trait lines).

And so on.

I have personally been able to finish diamond track in past few weeks, but because I now have a vacation = this more to play. I also have high rank and I am often playing outnumbered (Desolation doesn’t have a link, but we are facing a linked server every week). I checked and found that the vast majority of my PIPs come from the rank and outnumbered.

I can imagine that for players who don’t have high rank or aren’t often getting outnumbered it is really a full time job or even more to finish diamond track in time.

The ticket requirements for the armor and weapon skins are unreasonable. Even as a WvWvW veteran with 4000+ hours in the game mode, I am not going to bother. Why to play full time for minimum 2 years to get cool looking armor skin, which is NOT even legendary. And minimum 2 weeks to get one mistforged exotic weapon skin (350 tickets + 250 memoirs of battle) is way too much. Make at least the skins ascended or double the rate of tickets per week!

I feel the current PIP rate is too slow and makes the game feel like a chore. Combine this with the recent changes to the decay timer, which make scouting a pain, unless you have a wall to repair (and endless supply).

I feel Arenanet is making typical game designer mistake: listening to a small loud elite minority, which doesn’t mind the grind. But trust me, most of us have family, job(s) and/or studies, we don’t need yet another full-time job.

I think Arenanet made a fundamental mistake by using yet another time gated currency, the skirmish tickets, instead of using the badges of honor and proofs of heroics. People could accumulate badges and heroics at their own speed and even small increments would eventually matter and none would be wasted (now for example if you start diamond track, but don’t finish it in time, you are getting 40 tickets less).

runeblade.7514:

Deniara Devious.3948:

Better solution:
1. Nerf warrior mobility (40 s cooldown to GS #5 and 12 s with GS#3, to be in line with RtL note with forceful greatsword trait these would be still reduced 20%, 10 s to sword #2)

Their mobility are effected by cripple/chill and immobilize. Unlike thieves, mesmer and ele, cripple/chill and immobilize does not effect how far they escape. Their teleport can teleport to the second level while ignoring the stairs while warriors have to actually take the stairs. You can stun them. If they use stability, then you can cripple them. If they have zerker stance, they have no utility then. Their only choice is to escape. Without range weapons, they are useless. If they stay and fight, then you just need to be defensive until stability/zerker stance is gone. Then you will win the fight.

Warrior loses a lot by going full mobility. They lose their strong condi removal, Cleansing Ire, short cooldown stuns, and their right to be threatening. It is a troll build and nothing about the build is serious. Nothing about the build is threatening except to your ego that you must kill all things.

This is not a good reason to cripple GS mobility. As GS isn’t a great PvP weapon.

Every other profession’s mobility is affected by cripple, chill and immobilize. For comparison try to play a ranger and see what enemy immobilize does to you when you roam in WvWvW!

You are trying to make warriors look bad, but the fact is that in recent weeks I have seen more warriors as roamers than thieves or mesmers. And warriors and guardians have always been the most numerous professions in a WvWvW zergs. If warrior is so bad as you claim it to be, then why warrior has become the most common profession in roaming as well? It is really bad when one professions tops the list in every role. They are sniping the dolyaks, flipping the supply camps and killing enemy roamers, while having little risk of getting killed themselves.

Fact is: Warrior has the best land speed and incredibly good condition removal and resiliency towards movement impairing conditions. Being able to reset fights is very important in roaming.

Melandru armor set + dogged march + lemongrass poultry soup = -98% condition duration against chilled/cripple/immobilize and -25% stun duration

Mobile strikes trait removes immobilize using any movement skill. Warhorn charge removes all movement impairing conditions, but really isn’t needed in most mobility builds.

Realistically you cannot stop a mobility warrior from running away in an open field WvWvW setting. And the same build can still have good damage, CC, good sustainability, relatively high health pool and armor and condition cleansing. E.g. greatsword + longbow + fast hands makes the use of cleansing ire a piece of cake, unlike you claim. Signet of stamina is a full condition cleanse. And if you don’t take melandru armor set, signet of rage + 6xLyssa gives all the boons + full condition cleanse.

The fact remains: Arenanet buffed warrior too far. I am not against warrior having the highest health, best armor, massive amount of CC, good damage, good sustain, amazing condition removal and the best land speed, but to able to able to have almost
all of that in one just build is too much.

Warrior’s greatsword is an example of a badly designed weapon. It offers very high dps (if you get rooted or stunned and eat 100 blades, then you are toast) and the best mobility in the game and has a lackluster burst, which almost nobody uses. Either range of the mobility skills and/or their cooldown needs to be altered and put in line with other professions and weapons offer.

Please NO!

What is the fun if players cannot do any damage at all? People would just leave and go back to pve. Hint: majority of players prefer to use their own skills instead of sitting on siege.

The complete lack of boons would fully destroy many valid builds and not everybody can immediately afford to equip themselves with new gear.

Doubling the skill range would make the lag issues even worse (double the distance for all those calculations).

I really hope Arenanet doesn’t implement any of those ideas.

Please give us more even match ups, instead of the troll fest just suggested.

Zacchary.6183:

Click the PvP icon. Click “Enter Heart of the Mists”. Skip tutorial. Run forward. Look to your left. BAM! There you go.

He probably wants to test against those golems using his pve gear, consumables and everything, which is not possible in pvp.

It sounds like a solid build for small scale and solo roaming. And should be able to counter most thieves. I would however swap Elixir S for Elixir R. 4 dodges in a row + stun break is great. Toss Elixir R is a true-life saver if you get gibbed by a duo or trio thief team. At least in EU tier #1 many enemy thieves run in teams of 2 or 3.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elixir_R
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Toss_Elixir_R

I would also get rid of self-regulating defenses, as that auto-elixir S tends to be a pro-longed death wish in big fights (you cannot use any skills during that 3 seconds). Take fast-acting elixirs since you will be using multiple elixirs. More healing, stun break and two extra dodges every 36 s.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fast-Acting_Elixirs

With those small changes it sounds like a really good build. I personally prefer something different..My current build is actually less effective against thieves, but it has more group utility.

100 badges for just 1 ticket is way too little. If you look at
https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.badgesOfHonor

You can see that the average GW2 player has just 2951 badges (mean) and 1196 badges (median). That would translate only to 29 or 11 tickets. Proofs of heroics are even more rare: mean 212 and median is only 16. The players who have over 5k of proofs are exceedingly rare. Same: players who have over 50k badges are rare.

I think it is safe to say that most players earn much less than 500 badges per week. With your suggestion that would translate to mere 5 tickets.

I agree that there should be a conversion of WvWvW currencies, but the conversion formula should be more fair. After all these currencies are account bound and you cannot sell them to other players.

My suggestion:
10 badge of honor = 1 ticket
2 proofs of heroics = 10 badges of honor
2 proofs of heroics = 1 ticket

Dear Professor Sensei,

All profession have slower movement speed during combat and the speed buffs are capped at swiftness speed (+33% of out of combat movement speed). Please see:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_speed

Fleet Shadow trait allows the thief to move 1.5*210 u/s = 315 u/s, which is slightly faster then the out of combat normal speed (300 u/s), but slower than the out of combat swiftness speed (400 u/s). It is still clearly better than combat speed with swiftness 1.33*210 u/s = 279 u/s. In order words you can out run other professions who are in combat and using swiftness. It is also clearly better than signet of shadows, which gives you 1.25*210 u/s = 262.5 u/s in combat.

Celestial amulet is fine, for most professions it is sub optimal amulet. Celestial d/d elementalist is not fine, because elementalist can at same time have incredible sustain, good mobility and stack tons of might to compensate the lack of offensive stats. D/D ele also has access to a lot of burning, which stacks. I feel that the meta d/d ele build is a bunker build. It should still keep most of it’s sustain, but it’s ability stack burn and might should be reduced. Even if celestial would be removed, d/d elementalist would still be overpowered.

Really if celestial would be the main problem, then I think we would see much more players using it, but right now the marauders amulet seems much more common!

I really do not want celestial amulet to be gone since it is the only balanced stats choice. The game should offer hybrid stats as well and they should remain valid, but not overpowered. Nobody in their right mind if claiming that celestial engineer is overpowered right now.

Arenanet should also carefully rethink the balance between burns and bleeds. I feel that the bleeds do a bit too little base damage, while burning is strong even if you have no points invested in condition damage. Engineers can also do a lot of burning, but since bleeding has so low base damage, this pretty much killed hybrid engineer builds (together with changes to incendiary powder) and made condition engineer into a one trick pony (stack burns and hope you won’t die while your skills are on cd). Previously the grenade kit and the bomb kit were both good choices for power, celestial (hybrid) and condition. Now I feel that grenade kit, bomb kit and the mortar kit all work the best with power based stats (e.g. marauder, soldier etc).

The match making system is clearly inferior to Season 1. Mixing MMR + division pip range was an epic mistake and I am still waiting for an apology from Arenanet. The current system leads to countless of pointless matches of either huge losses (and no chances of winning) and huge wins (and no chances of losing) as the “better” players are placed in team A and “worse” players in team B.

One guy did a math simulation to prove the MMR hell is true. See:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/The-nature-of-MMR-hell/

It is also obvious that the removal of amulets of was just a lazy band aid “fix”, which didn’t fix the core issue of the power creep since trait rework and most importantly the overpowered elite specs. Now we have more burst and less bunkers, but amount of builds seen is not significantly better or worse.

I have both level 80 elementalist and engineer. Everytime I play my D/D elementalist it feels like a faceroll. Elementalist players saying that is difficult to play an elementalist, but really what is difficult about it? It is beyond belief that Arenanet hasn’t nerfed elementalist, because at the moment D/D ele is by far the best build in the game. Lots of condition removal and healing, can keep up boons more or less permanently, high mobility and good damage and amazing escape options with ride the lightning, vapor and mist form.

Kit refinement is a very weak copy of elementalist’s elemental attunement (both adept level traits). Engi KR effects are weaker and last just 2 seconds. Elementalist boons last much longer, are more useful and there is no internal 20 s cooldown.

Almost none of the skill balance updates Anet has made in past 6 months have made sense. The skill updates lack coherence, they appear more or less like small random refinements and then some really strange changes (like the KR rework).

But on the positive note, finally they fixed culling and it is tons better now. I am also happy that they nerfed quickness, which should have been 50% to begin with.

Forceful greatsword has always been a problematic trait. Master level, giving both 20% cooldown reduction on gs/spear, but also might on crits with no internal cooldown is huge. I really don’t understand why Arenanet needed to add 10% unconditional buff to this, because overpowered traits like this limit build versatility. My suggestion: remove this 10% buff, but keep the trait otherwise as it is, since warriors are not in that good spot in meta.

Now everybody and their uncle is running GS. In spvp/wvwvw roaming GS/hammer is probably the most common warrior build. In pve GS has always been by far the most common weapon used by warriors.

In my opinion GS does not need any buffs at the moment. I know GS #5 (rush) is hit or miss, but the weapon offers both massive DPS, decent burst, lots of mobility, ranged cripple, evade, permanent fury (with arcing slice) and might stacking (with forceful greatsword). Instead I would hope Arenanet would look at other underused weapon related traits and warrior weapons.

Warrior has several other weapon combinations which simply suck:
x/axe (axe/axe, mace/axe, sword/axe)
axe/warhorn
mace/warhorn

Sword/warhorn has one niche usage: running. All the warhorn nerfs really made it a weak weapon. Rifle with berserker/gunflame is one trick pony.

This leaves warrior with several solid weapon of choices:
greatsword
hammer (still the best AoE CC weapon)
longbow
axe/x
x/shield

sword/x and x/sword are okay at their current state in meta.

I hope the underused/weak weapons and weapon combinations would be addressed. I know a lot players will come to this threat to defend their favorite weapon: greatsword, but it really doesn’t make sense to turn this game into greatsword wars 2. Reapers made most necros use GS and GS has always been #1 weapon of choice for mesmers.

Let’s get fact straight.

I have played, not level crafted, all 8 professions to level 80 and done WvWvW with them. Engineer is the most difficult profession to master well. Try solo roaming with power rifle engineer using grenade kit and you will know.

If you want easy profession try comparing engineer with the heavy armor professions, like guardian and warrior. Guardian has tons of passive things going on (health regeneration, aegis, burning, condition removal etc) which do NOT require any interaction from the player. Warrior has always been the king of pve and now arguably very strong in spvp and the strongest profession in WvWvW as well. If you argue that engineer has higher dps than an axe/mace + greatsword warrior, then please proof that using videos or show us the build.

Bomb kit autoattack hits stronger than grenade kit auto attack. In fact the grenade kit auto attack is really weak auto attack considering it is just 120 radius (bomb kit #1 is 180 radius). If you want to compare the dps you really need to take in account the actual attack rate, which is always lower than the listed number (1/2 activation time). Even when traited with grenadier grandmaster trait bomb kit #1 is 25% stronger, larger radius = huge difference.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Grenade
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bomb
Just look at the damage multipliers and do the math. Bomb kit wins.

I don’t have much experience in spvp / tpvp, but I know WvWvW. Power engineers and rifle engineers in general seem to be rare as hen’s teeth. About 90% of the enemy engineers are running condition based builds and using either pistol/pistol or pistol/shield. Grenade kit #1 isn’t viable option for them as it would do so little damage in a condition build and just be semi-viable in a hybrid power + condi build (e.g. celestial gear) as you need to be in very close range to make all those grenades hit.

Bomb kit seems to be as common as the grenade kit. Flamethrower and elixir gun are also often used kits. Healing turret seems to be the most popular healing skill. Since they are also so often used, do you plan to nerf them as well?

I agree on one thing with the OP: condition spam semi-bunker / full bunker builds are a bit too strong at the moment. Most builds cannot squeeze in enough condition removal, conditions ignore the armor and the attacker needs to invest only in one stat (condition) instead of three stats (power, precision, critical damage). To fix this Arenanet could consider an overall nerf to some of the most problematic conditions e.g. shave off some dps from burning (the most damaging condition) and make poison last a shorter time. Or make it so that each dodge roll removes one condition. This would affect all professions.

If you want to change grenade kit somehow, then make it more into a smart control kit, instead of just spamming all the grenade skills on cool down:
flash grenade would do only blind, no damage (pure control)
reduce damage of freeze and poison grenade, BUT at the same time slightly increase the damage of grenade kit auto attack (#1) to keep it on par with the bomb kit.

DevonCarver.5370:

The main reason is simply that at the point that outmanned does that, it encourages servers to have fewer players on to take advantage of the stat boost. That, in turn, will cause people to yell at other players for logging on and taking away the buff.

That is a valid point. I am not sure if it is strong enough to completely dismiss the idea of e.g. giving the NPCs and structures added toughness and health for the outmanned side. Assume there would be no player bonuses or they would be limited to max +30% health + toughness increase when the side is very badly outmanned e.g. just 10% or less of total population on that map. Now those who are playing on the badly outmanned side will have trouble even scoring any kills, because the large number of enemies can always revive the downed player so fast (I know there are things like stealth stomp, but let’s not make all of us roll into thieves). At least I would rather have more human players on my side than some minor buffs.

It would be fairly simple to avoid some server intentionally abusing this system. Example of abuse one server gathers all their forces into one giant blob and teleport from one map to another, while all other 3 maps are empty and thus outmanned. To prevent this just make the outmanned buffs so that they never trigger if the total population of all maps for that side is >= 30 %.

I have a question for Arenanet:
Are you planning to do something major to address the WvWvW population and coverage issues?

e.g. free transfers to those servers who haven’t won for ages or to those servers who have low WvWvw population? Or different scoring system which rewards the server points divided by their population percentage e.g. a server with 50% of all 3 servers WvWvW population will get twice less server points, compared to a server with 25% of WvWvW population. Players would still get the same points from objectives.

Well, almost everybody agrees that it is not worthy to pursue the BL, yet it significantly affects the server scoring (easily 1/3 of the server points come from stomping!).

The problem of making BL matter even more is that seriously outnumbered servers are gonna be screwed even worse. We should really avoid design choices to make this game almost impossible uphill battle. The downward spiral happens very easily. E.g. yesterday I was playing in Eternal Battlegrounds. We were outnumbered all the time (having that rather useless outnumbered “buff” on us). At one point our numbers dropped to as low as about 7. We saw Gunnar’s Hold run in a blob of 30 something, which is not that big, but impossible to win in an open battle with less than 10. Then we saw GH having built multiple golems. Simply nothing to do as the TS channels were empty (no reinforcements). I decided to have some snack. We lost everything from the map. Somebody turned on the commander tag and a few more people joined in. Next the other server, Augury Rock comes to stomp over our small group. I managed to flee and eventually got killed in a different part of the map, trying to alone defend our last spot on the map (supply camp). I didn’t rage quit, but our commander did and lots of others just left the map. I cannot blame them. We got things back normal when our very good Russian guild came to the map.

If anet insists to keep the ruins, I think they should only serve as a method for that particular borderland to provide NPC related defensive bonuses and structural bonuses (stronger doors, walls, siege equipment etc). These bonuses should ONLY affect that particular server’s own borderland and ONLY when it is outnumbered. Thus if it is server A borderland, only server A can get this bonus, but enemy can try to deny it by preventing them to hold these bonuses. Thus server B and C can never get any BL benefits on enemy BLs.

The BL bonuses should NOT be stretched over other maps. The reasoning behind my suggestion is that: it would allow the outnumbered defenders to significantly delay the outnumbering opposing forces. E.g. let’s say holding each circle would give +20% more health to NPC and structures (siege equipment, walls, doors). Holding all 5 points would double 5x +20% = +100%, which is a significant increase. Doors would still melt fast with 4-6 omega/guild golems (like my small story above illustrates), but this another sad issue, which needs addressing.

These bonuses should NOT be active when the server doesn’t have an outnumbered buff on it, since it would once again make the game almost mission impossible for the outnumbered side on the map.

Note: I was suggesting only vitality buffs to NPCs and structures and only on the outnumbered side. Player based bonuses are way too easily abused (imagine a full berserker thief with +100% buff = double health… them running in pairs on the side having these buffs and ganking those who they want with extremely little risk). Adding offensive bonuses is a really bad idea and just adds to the power creep.

Big problem: NO matter how you design these bonuses (even my suggestion), the side with higher numbers vs very low numbers has a superior advantage. E.g. imagine you have just 1 player + 2 upleveled allies. I have been commanding in such situation. The level 2 guardian is not that bad. He dies to almost anything and some other commanders might call him a rallybot, but I rather have even level 2 character on my side, because he can still carry supplies and the rams, ACs and catapults get built faster. Any 3 people is better than just one or two if you want to capture towers and keeps faster! But if you have so few people and even if you 10 people on the map (typical situation!!), it doesn’t make any sense to split them and send them all over the map to cap these bonuses.

Thus the final conclusion: the whole 5 point capping idea simply does not work for WvWvW. It will always end up favoring the side with bigger numbers and the one with very low number of players isn’t able to benefit from them.

Kungsmurfen.2861:

Deniara Devious.3948:

Desolation used to be tier #1 server.

So did Blacktide.

Fair comparison. I was actually on Blacktide in Autumn 2012-December 2012. We were #1 EU server back then, but after the free fall I migrated to Desolation and I have been there ever since. Maybe in few months Blacktide and Desolation will be fighting each other.

Now the Desolation WvWvW numbers are all time low and I am predicting we will be soon “medium” population server. We have constant outnumbered “buff” on 3-4 maps. Last night at worst we had a total 5 players on all maps. We lost everything, because enemy player vs door blobs. I tagged up and commanded for 2.5 hours to get at least our fair share back, but I cannot be on several maps at same time. I normally don’t play at night, because I have a day time job, but sometimes I just cannot fall asleep.

I don’t recommend anybody moving to Desolation unless you want to experience the hard mode. Fights are often vs 2-3 times larger well organized enemy. But even the enemy numbers are not as big as they used to be. The borderlands in EU top tiers are more or less empty outside the prime time and even during prime time only 1 BL + EBG has action.

This game mode is dying and Arenanet stubbornly wants us to wait yet another 9 months. Why cannot they give us the old Alpine borderland back right now, remove those the imbalanced elements like banners and massively increase the WvWvW rewards, which are pitiful now?

I think it depends on the player. Those players who main character’s profession got massive buffs in recent Jun 23 are probably very happy, while some others, e.g. engineers, are probably grumpy as the patch deleted so many trait options and builds completely. Those warriors, who don’t use greatsword nor rampage, probably feel a bit kitten as well, even though warrior nerfs were small. It is just that everything else got buffed so much.

Now the meta certainly is different and there can be bursts which shot characters down as fast as CounterStrike. And you can repeat the burst soon again if you fail. Several mesmer builds (mantra shatter and PU) and D/D elementalist are the main offenders and don’t have enough counter-play.

On the positive side: thieves no longer hard counter mesmers. Necromancer, which used to be the underdog, now has several viable builds. Ranger hasn’t yet found itself in meta, but I feel it has very strong 1 vs 1 builds and can have lots of sustain to hold points.

Those who don’t enjoy the relatively huge imbalance between professions and burst + bunker meta, probably left the game and will be checking back again in Autumn 2015 (when possible HoT comes out?). But it is not all about the meta. I simply fail to understand why the leaderboards have been frozen for months (what is the advantage of this?!?). Pvp needs better match up making, solo queue back and working leaderboards.

I think the developers should now be releasing more frequent balance updates (once per week) to adjust the most overpowered traits, sigils, runes etc and buff some underused ones. Mesmer’s ability to stun frequently (confounding suggestions) and disengage (stealth + teleports) and set up massive burst from stealth needs to be toned down. D/D ele’s ability to stack might and burn and spam blind needs to be toned down.

Thank you!

I have noticed that loot is heavily reduced in zerg situations. E.g. I spam AoE at enemy zerg, get 10-25 stacks of bloodlust and lots of WXP, but get much less loot bags than before.

BUT when I solo roam, I still get the same amount of loot when I kill enemy players, NPC or monsters.

It seems they probably increased the limit of how much damage you need to inflict on a target to be eligible for loot. When are you killing stuff alone, of course you always meet these limits, thus loot is the same.

If this really is the case, then I am all for it. You may call me crazy, but I like this kind of change. It urges people to roam in very small groups instead of mindless zerging. On the other hand the solo rewards are too small, compared to any other form of this game. Thus I think the drop rate of more valuable things (instead of chips and broken fangs, porous bones etc) should be increased.

But can somebody confirm or disproof my theory?

The WvWvW titles should have some progression. E.g.
- 1000 kills the 1st title, which you can display (realm avenger, basically a sign "I am not a total newbie)
- 10000 kills for the 2nd title (realm dominator, “a WWW veteran”)
- 100000 kills for the 3rd title (ultimate dominator, “enemies, run away”)

I am sure the 100000 kills title would still be rare. Currently the system is a bad joke compared to the pvp titles: 200 kills in tournaments gives you a champion slayer title and you get a gladiator title with mere 8500 pvp points.

NinjaEd.3946:

xbutcherx.3861:

NinjaEd.3946:

Olba.5376:

runeblade.7514:

New Earthshaker-

Jump to the targeted location and slam your hammer down, damaging, dazing, and crippling foes.

2s duration at 3 bars of adrenaline.

What it will do: Give players time to react to Backbreaker + Staggering blow. It will make the combo less unfair as Earthshaker is very cheap to use + very reliable stun.

Hammer has already been nerfed a ton of times. The only place where people consistently run Hammer is sPvP and zergs in WvW. Both of these are due to Hammer being an AoE weapon, which fits perfectly with the mechanics of both of those cases.

In case you missed with, the combo on Hammer is already capped with the high cooldown on Backbreaker. Even traited, it’s 24s, which is plenty of time to replenish your defenses between rotations.

So your argument is because hammer isn’t in pve, its ok?

Backbreaker isn’t a problem, earthshaker isn’t a problem, staggering blow isn’t a problem, its all of these in 1 kit that’s the problem. You can only dodge/blind so many hits before something hits, and if you don’t play aggressively to some degree their Healing signet/adrenal healing out does you.

Oh yeah with the staggering 1 sec push + the wow 2 sec knowdown (backbreaker) and the amazing 2s full adrenaline earthshaker…! 3 skills that does jack damage, and force you to trait : Merciless Hammer: Hammer damage is increased when a foe is disabled. Reduces recharge on hammer skills, if you want a little more damage of course, trading off any stability or Cleansing Ire.
Btw you just need to evade\block 1 of those skills or snare a warrior to break the chain.

They don’t need to trait merciless hammer, and they don’t need to get every one of those off, the few seconds of cc is enough for them to start a combo. Even without a zerker set up you can hit hard with hammer, and in general mess up over and over on many warrior builds and still pick yourself up. There is too little a risk for playing (most) warrior builds. I understand frontline builds are supposed to be beefy but the amount of screw ups I can do on them is a joke. They get the necessities of a well rounded build far easier than the rest, and that’s the problem.

I understand their condi clear outside of cleansing ire is bad, and cleansing ire for the most part is a well thought trait, but at the same time its not hard to utilize. Healing signet is most definitely the worst designed healing skill when its punishing to use the active, cc spam (an issue with everyone not just warrior), etc complaints go on. There is just too much in their kit atm and that’s the reason why they are incredibly popular in every part of the game.

Exactly this. ^^ Very well said.

Feel My Wrath certainly is too much. In fact it has given WvWvW zergs perma quickness. I think the 6 seconds duration and 60 s cooldown sounds reasonable. This would limit quickness into bursts and not like whole match lasting boon.

Guardian definitely isn’t in a bad place. WvWvW is full of guardians (and has always been). Spvp has lots of guardians. Pve has lots of guardians. If guardian would be so weak, this wouldn’t be the case.

Xillllix.3485:

EotM is an amazing map that is underestimated by people who have no clue how to play it strategically. It would balance itself quite well if players bothered to defend it for PPT. With a team rotation between the 3 sides every day I don’t see what the balance problem would be.

The only reason it is used as a karma train is because it rewards you more for PvE events than for PPT. It has nothing to do with the map design.

If you really think so, why don’t you enlighten us “clueless” people why EotM map design is so great.

Note: I have worked as game designer and programmer and teaching the topic for over 10 years at university.

In my analysis EotM has:
- way too much verticality
- way too many chokepoints
- way too many edges where you can fall into void
- way too many distracting visual effects (flying sand)
- unbalanced overpowered NPCs and buffs for the different colors
- completely lacks the element of water (some players enjoy underwater)

Plus it also looks ugly to my eyes, but that is only an opinion. You have to understand that there is a large variety of WvWvW players who enjoy different play style. EotM only caters few of those play styles, mainly zone wide blob zerging. It is an absolutely horrible map for small scale and solo roaming as you are often forced to walk along the narrow bridges, where you are surely going to be spotted without any stealth. Professions have very unequal access to stability and means to knock off other players off the ledge. Heavy armors are already overly abundant in WvWvW, now replacing the real WvWvW maps with EotM failure design, would mean we would have even more of them as they have the best access to stability. Necromancer is also part of the GWEN meta and I can easily imagine that spectral wall would be the perfect trolling skill in EotM, but does that make it a better map? NO.

Johje Holan.4607:

Deso appears to be doing well, why all the negativity?

The score will be totally different by Tuesday morning. In fact right now Deso holds only 18% of the entire 4 maps and VS is ticking almost triple points. Deso has no night capping force or coverage to speak of. Deso has always been the strongest during reset weekend and then losing ground during week when many of our players actually need to work. Our prime time is good, but outside prime time we are sometimes so badly outmanned, it requires a lot of dark sense of humor to pull through this.

I am quite sure Jade and Visunah will sooner or later also double team us, as soon us we get outmanned tags on.

Good job Arenanet developers! You should maybe add a special 2x attacking power plus health bonus for that side, who is doing night capping plus a new boon “together we are more”, which gives +100% boon duration and +1000 to all ability scores when you have at least 40 guys in 1200 radius area. Oh and multiply the WXP points and server points by number of active players. More is better!

I recommend Arenanet also to consult leading Visunah players how to make the WvWvW experience better for all of us. Winning every week is so much fun and those who lose are just bad players and whiners.

The current outmanned buff can be described as a joke. The illogical AoE limit and downed state makes it very difficult to score any kills when the enemy controls the entire map and greatly outnumbers you. Even if you manage to down an opponent, his team mates will revive him quickly, thus you don’t get kills. Where’s the fun?

The outmanned should be reworked as follows:
1. Give health and thoughness boost to the outmanned side players, NPCs and structures e.g. 20%-40% increase in thoughness and health or like the original poster suggested: overall 20-40% reduction in received damage.
- the size of the buff might vary based how badly you are outnumbered
- so small increase in health and thoughness would not make the outmanned side too powerful, in fact if the enemy outnumbers them even by just 2:1, they should still have no trouble killing the outmanned
- care must be taken not to give too good durability to outmanned players, because otherwise stealthed players on the outmanned side will become more of less immortal e.g. imagine a thief who remains visible only for 4 seconds. If his health would double, it would be difficult to spike him down during that time and then he would stealth again
2. Outmanned should never be visible to the enemy
- Having some party marked as outmanned has lead that side being constantly sandwiched and picked by both enemy sides as they see an easy victim there. It has also left to spawn camping, which I have experienced as the outmanned side countless of times. I know there is the commander Siegerazer/Siegecrusher breakout event, but honestly this is not that useful. I have once commanded our troops to spawn camp the enemy (which was NOT outmanned), we slaughtered them for 2 hours in a row in front of their gates. Killing Siegerazer/Siegecrusher is not that difficult.

There needs to be some balancing force! Glicko system keeps the tiers very static as we have seen in past couple of months, not much changes.

Anet needs to understand that is a dire situation and leads to entire server doing desperate things.

I play for Desolation, which is at the moment still in euro tier #1. We are planning to intentionally drop down to tier 2. More interestingly Seafarer’s Rest is also planning to do the same, intentionally drop to tier #2 from tier #1. If Anet doesn’t yet understand that there is something fundamentally wrong with their game balancing when two tier #1 worlds intentionally decide to leave tier #1, then I don’t what gets through their thick skulls?

We have been red color already for many months in a row and most of our players are sick and tired to being hopelessly outnumbered outside prime time and have all our upgraded keeps, towers etc. night capped every single night. I don’t blame our enemy for doing the obvious: spawn camping, selecting the outmanned side as their #1 target. I blame Arenanet for making the joke called “outmanned buff”!

In past weeks several major guilds have left our server. Some might come back when the situation gets better.

TexZero.7910:

the damage wasnt the availability was.

the new light aura is downright strong. I haven’t tested it but i would love to see if powerful aura’s works with it for Ele. Seems like it could have some good results.

Retaliation damage has been upped as well. This has been confirmed by so many players and calculations.

It should be both in pvp and WvWvW:
(198 + (0.075 * Power)) * 0.66
But instead (current bugged version after the patch) it is:
198 + 0.075 * Power * 0.66

It should be very easy to fix this, but Arenanet still hasn’t reacted to this.

Dayra.7405:

Tournament is a bit boring when the winner is determined by ANet via full-status and server-linking.

^^ this ^^

Here in EU the TOP #1 server usually always has a link. And if that server loses a link, then it is just a matter of that it is no longer #1. Transferring to a linked server is cheap, so the tournament would just lead to massive bandwagoning to the linked server for easy win. No thank you for such kind of “tournament”.

I very much like the original GW1 and GW2 maps. Places like Queensdale, Timberline falls and Cursed Shore are all amazing and have provided me countless of hours of fun. Beautiful art direction and very natural feeling of real nature etc. But all the new maps after the launch of this game have been a big disappointment (this includes both spvp, WvWvW and pve). Maps like Skyhammer (spvp), borderlands with ruins (instead of lake) or the new Desert borderlands aka Edge of the Mists 2.0 are just abominations.

I also seriously dislike the new HoT pve maps. I always hated jumping puzzles and the requirement of gimmicky ways to travel from A to B. This reminds me of Dry Top, which is still probably the worst pve map in this game.

The challenge should the monsters, not the traveling! And there should not be constant fear of falling down. I love to fight and I excel in that. The new pve mobs are not challenging. You don’t even need to use the dodge button to defeat most of them. Just play a build which has enough AoE DPS and they all die reasonably fast. Even the group events and champions are soloable. I wish the designers would have spent more time honing the AI of the monsters, make them similar to the NPC AI of GW1, which was far superior than anything seen in GW2.

Luckily the specializations can be unlocked from WvWvW. There is still the Eternal Battlegrounds. I refuse to play the new borderland maps much. The more I play them, the less I like them. More lag, yet less enemies to fight (in fact you rarely even see other players). They are beautiful, but way too big, empty and difficult to travel and full of boring pve events. Anyways I just unlocked my main characters specilizations by playing WvWvW (mainly in EB) and I will do the same for other professions.

The designers should understand: Many players want more of the same e.g. maps similar to the great designs I mentioned (from Queensdale to Timberline Falls from Alpine borderlands to Battle of Kyhlo), instead of something totally different and too gimmicky, which just alienates big part of the player base.

Excellent and constructive post. I agree on everything, except I do NOT see WvWvW as a bridge between pve and spvp. WvWvW is the true end game of GW2. I know much more players who only enjoy WvWvW and are not interested in spvp or much any pve.

I hope the Arenanet staff reads this thread.

I have completed the story with several characters and while I haven’t yet gotten all my 8 characters to level 80, I have been playing them enough to get a general feel, unlocking most of their skills and elites for pve and WvWvW.

Here is my list:
1. Thief
- unlike the other posters complained. Thief is fine for pve. Very easy to play and high survivability due superb mobility + superb downed state. So even if you get downed you can alone get back to fight without any armor repair bills. Thief is not meant to face tank your enemies and you can use other weapons besides dagger and pistol in pve.
- very linear and repetitive (boring) to play with too few viable options for the player
- reason #1 why people quit spvp or WvWvW
- thief burst damage should be reduced
- haste is too good, allowing so fast spike that reaction isn’t always possible
- heartseeker is currently spammable gap closer. It should have higher initiative cost and not autotarget / fly to enemy while inflicting huge damage
- steal / mug should do slightly less damage. The mechanic itself is fine
- cluster bomb is the most overpowered area attack skill in the game. Yes, even elementalists don’t have anything like it
- either change stealth into blocking (while being still visible) or make the stealth last a bit shorter time and in stealth characters should be able to move only half of the speed
- give thieves some support and utility e.g. shadow refuge is superb skill, but currently the only really good thief support skill. Maybe buff venom and trap skills and give thieves the ability to remove conditions from allies or remove a boon from the enemy?

2. Engineer
- By far the rarest character class in high level pve and WvWvW
- fun to play, but also requires more effort to play effectively than other other profession
- reason #1 to go away from keyboard / ragequit in pvp if you get an engineer in team.
- Engineer does less dps than any other profession, yet it is not versatile like Anet says it is. Fix: Engineer weapons should do more direct damage, perhaps benefit from the +power etc. stats of the main hand weapon?
- most traits are bugged/broken or underpowered. E.g. adrenal implant is a joke of a grandmaster trait, for example rangers get a minor trait called natural vigor, which does the same! Make the traits both useful and fix the bugs
- many weapon kits are also bugged or so quirky making them half-useless e.g. elixir gun doesn’t heal enough (increase the amount of healing, make it scale with healing power), elixir gun #2 misses 90% of the time against moving opponents. Med kit antidote doesn’t remove all conditions like it says in the description and pretty much useless if you get rooted (immobilize)
- many of the defensive abilities of engineer have too long cooldowns (60 s or so), reduce them to 30 s.
- too many random effects, not viable to competitive play
- Turrets are pretty much useless
- Elites are useless, besides the Supply crate

3. Necromancer
- probably the 2nd rarest class in high level pve and WvWvW
- very easy profession to play with high survivability due having death shroud, which is basically a 2nd health bar
- unlike the typical complaints seen in forums, necros can dish out good dps and burst with a power necro build (25 stacks vulnerability, dagger/dagger, axe/focus) also necro staff is a solid good long distance weapon.
- maybe give necros even more life steal, not by much, but 10% increase
- Some of the wells and other skills have too long cooldown
- Minions feel meh, basically like weaker versions of ranger’s pet. Some Ranger pets can tank better or inflict tons of different conditions. Does anybody find the minions useful besides taking up aggro in pve? Suggestion: give minions abilities to inflict some more conditions

Deniara

Pickmansmodel.1298:

There is a trade-off between making SPVP exciting for casual players and making it an esport. Arenanet are committed to the later, and therefore most GW2 players ignore SPVP. That’s why the SPVP player base is so small, and you can’t find team-mates. It is what it is.

The e-sport thing won’t be happening. First of in order to have a e-sport you need to have:
1. A large player base (you need a more casual player friendly game to achieve this)
2. Enough game balance to have a lot more valid builds and counters to them (currently game balance is a joke)
3. Spectator mode (could be added later)
4. Proper rewards (ingame rewards e.g. Black Lion Keys to open chests, and money rewards for winning tournaments)
5. Good leaderboard system (built-into the game, past and current rankings and lots of statistics, ability to view recent top tournament matches)

Now all these things are missing.

Guardian has always been TOP tier profession in WvWvW. Guardian has been WvWvW meta since Autumn 2012. Sometimes half of some zergs have been guardians. Don’t you think there should be place for a bit more diversity?

Juxtapositronic.1405:

If thieves are a problem for you in wvw then you are doing one of three things: 1.) You are being afk. 2.) You have some terribad spec. 3.) Your gearing is wrong.

One might also put this other way round, if a thief is squishy, he must be doing it wrong:
1) wrong traits and 2) wrong gear

Many thief players tell that they are squishy, but that is because they didn’t invest much anything on defense, yet they use this same argument to tell you “thief is balanced, because it is so squishy”. Funnily these same guys will tell you that your gear is wrong and that you should have at least 25k health and 3k armor or you deserve to die to a thief… I can imagine how many of those thieves players are running that high armor and health: NONE!

Prime example of double morale.

The biggest problem is the following:

This game has no diminishing returns on hard crowd control. You can get chain stunned and knocked down etc. many times in a row. Especially all the medium armor professions have very limited access to stability. This is what makes the hammer melee trains so incredibly powerful. Yes, they are overpowered and have been the WvWvW meta since Autumn 2012. And easy way to make this more balanced would be give a all the players a short amount of time, let’s say 1 second, when her character is immune to hard CC skills (stun, knockback, launch, pull, daze, fear). I know 1 second immunity between stuns is not much, but at least it would give some escape window to dodge away from harm’s way. This suggested change would have minimal effect on small scale and 1 vs 1 situations.

Another thing: This game has some skills, which are doing too many things at same time, without having a very long cooldown. A well-designed skill should do just one powerful thing or two mediocre things, never two powerful things, unless it is has a very long cooldown. Area skills doing multiple powerful things with very low cooldown are even more broken than single target skills. If you look at Earth shaker using this fair skill balancing method, you see it is utterly broken:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Earthshaker

2 second, 240 radius AoE stun
1.25 damage multiplier (decent damage)
600 leap
combo finisher blast

Now already the 2 second area stun is extremely powerful on itself, especially on so low cooldown skill. The skill should NOT offer any additional effects: No leap, no combo finisher, no damage to keep it in line with all the stun skills with low cooldown.
Alternative way to balance the skill is to reduce the radius of the stun area to 120 s and stun duration to 1 second with full adrenaline, but I am sure most warrior’s would prefer the first method of balancing. I am also for reducing the duration or effectiveness of stun skills across all professions (this skills should be balanced with very long cooldowns). Static field has also been the essential part of the WvWvW meta since launch. I know it is used to swiftness stacking using the lightning field, but giving it also 1200 ranged AoE stun which is unblockable is problematic and gives yet another easy way to continuously stun the opponents. The unblockable effect should be removed from it.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Static_Field_

Littlefeather.8623:

This game has always favored range over melee, in PvE, PvP and even WvW.

Since when melee sucked in pve? Have you looked at dungeon speed run records? They use mostly melee.

Melee train is the meta in top WvWvW. Majority is melee train is hammer + sword/warhorn warriors, followed then by guardians. Supported by a few staff elementalists, necromancers and mesmers. Some top teams use a ranger and a thief as well, but generally medium armor professions are not part of WvWvW meta.

E.g. look at this list of the world’s top WvWvW guilds. You can see a lot of their game play videos at youtube. It is very heavy melee oriented and pure ranged teams run away.
http://gw2gvg.com/

I am fine with the self-knockdown. It is good compromise between risk and reward. But the skill’s range is pathetic compared point black shot (ranger long bow #4):

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Overcharged_Shot
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Point_Blank_Shot

Both have 15 second cooldown.
Overcharged shot (engi rifle #4) has 400 range (500 traited), self-knockdown, 450 launch
Point Black Shot (ranger LB #4) has 900 range (1125 traited), 400-600 knockback, no self-knockdown

The engineer’s overcharged shot should have at least 500 range if not traited and 800 range with the rifled barrels trait.

But rifle #3, blunderbuss, is an even bigger problem. Maximum damage at 100!! (less than melee range). When is this gonna get fixed?!?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blunderbuss

style.6173:

Looks like the matchups in NA are very close right now with the exception of tier 2 and tier 8. Looks like the match-ups are working for this week.

Even before this new random system the match ups in NA were generally more even than in EU.

I think the real reason is that most NA servers have coverage. You have players playing at all hours. Here in EU most servers have very little players outside peak hours. Even the EU #1 server Visunah has rather small night team, but they are able to win their opponents by night capping everything.

Until the coverage issues have been sorted, EU tiers are gonna be full of blow outs. Many people have been writing about this for ages, yet zero comment or action from Arenanet…

This entire “balance” patch is a BAD joke when it comes to engineer rifle. It seems the developers do NOT understand the game at all nor the engineer profession.

People choose hammer over rifle, because of the utility it gives. I haven’t done any tests, but I think the damage between rifle and hammer is roughly the same, but hammer has far better utility. You can reflect and black and do good damage at same time with hammer. Hammer has 1200 range AoE stun, blast finisher, lighting field etc. A mere 10 % damage buff to bluderbuss isn’t gonna make it break or break it. And why the change is just pvp specific? Rifle engineers are rare as hen’s teeth in WvWvW, so they would even more require buffs in WvWvW. Hammer is much more common there as well.

If Arenanet would have wanted to buff rifle, they would have been adding functionality to rifle:
- make blunderbuss (rifle #3) a blast finisher
- add evade frame to jump shot (rifle #5) and make the animation tiny bit faster to make it a viable movement skill (now immobilize in air really ruins it)

I would leave overcharged shot (rifle #4) as it is. High risk and high reward. And yes, I would shave off hammer a bit, it has too many goodies going on at same time.

It is really sad that Arenanet doesn’t seem to get “it”, when it comes to balancing engineer. They added some damage to rocket boots, which is was another stupid change. People do NOT choose rocket boots for the damage, but for the utility. At the current form most gadgets are sorely underpowered compared to kits, elixirs and gyros. A better to way to make them more viable is to add some functionality e.g. make rocket kick a stun break and/or lower the cooldown.

Not to mention Arenanet destroyed medkit when they turned in into “toss” skills. Medkit really needs attention. Why an earth still medkit #1 doesn’t heal the engineer himself and has so small cone it is really utterly useless skill in the game (compared to druid staff auto attack and ele water staff #1, which both do damage and heal at same time).

*The lack of viable healing skills for many professions is a serious issue e.g. almost all warrior’s use healing signet for obvious reasons. *Arenanet could have made some other healing skills viable e.g. reducing the cooldown “To the limit!” to 25 s and lowering the healing amount accordingly or reducing the activation time to 1/2 s.

The lack of diversity in viable builds is one of the biggest problems in spvp and I don’t see this patch much fixing it. The deletion of many amulets + HoT power creep was the last straw for me.

Nokaru.7831:

Deniara Devious.3948:

Stealth is more powerful in WvWvW than in spvp. Yet revealed is shorter in WvWvW.
…
Yet boon duration runes work in WvWwW like in pve!
…
I simply fail to understand Arenanet’s logic. Probably there is NO logic.

These are not deliberate decisions. They have only recently split skills specifically for WvW. By default, they use their PvE equivalents.

I am pretty sure the stealth revealed changed was deliberate (and very unfortunate). It was 4 s for a while, then they reverted it back to 3 s without ever explaining why. Even a child can understand that stealth is not that powerful in spvp/tpvp, because the map is much smaller and you cannot contest points while being in stealth. In WvWvW stealth is extremely powerful.

But back to the topic:
I would be happy if retaliation would be changed in the following ways (all 3 must apply):
1. Retaliation scales with condition damage (makes more sense than tying almost everything to power, there is already too much synergy with consumables and PVT gear)
2. Retaliation does full damage, in other words the formula is:
198.45 + (0.075 * Condition Damage)
3. Retaliation can trigger only 5 times per second per attacker, no matter how many targets it affected.

With my version and assuming 2000 points in condition damage retaliation could 4×349 = 1745 damage per second. It would put considerable hurt on AoE spammers, but not be that overpowered hard counter, which is going to instant kill you. Rangers using barrage at a tightly packed enemy blob full of retaliation could get up to that 1745 damage/s, which is a lot, but they could at least cancel their skill. Grenade chucking engineers would still need to be careful as the grenades fly so slowly, but a grenadier wouldn’t generally take more than around 2000 dmg from retaliation/s.

My version would actually be more powerful than the current retaliation (with the nerf) against single target and fast attack e.g. warrior’s 100 blades or thief’s unload.

Ulion.5476:

It should be 3 proof of heroics = 10 badges of honor = 1 ticket. Since you get 6 proof of heroic or 20 badges of honor from the skirmish chests. This would add upto 80 extra ticket per week once you convert the rewards from completing the pip track. You would also get around 50 tickets if you gain 25 wxp level a week. The conversion system would add an extra 130 tickets if you complete the reward track and gain 25wxp levels a week.

The biggest issues with a conversion system is that the top wvwers would instantly complete the Warbringer and at least 2 prestige set(forgot proof of heroics). Zerger would have an advantage in getting tickets. That why it should cost some silver per conversion (10-25s).

Wvwer would get to many tickets to fast. Atm you can get upto 8400 ticket every year and it takes 2 years to get all of the high end wvw rewards. With a conversion system on top of the most active wvwer getting the warbringer and 2 prestige armor instantly, they would be able to get the next prestige armors within 3months. What would wvwer do with their tickets after that? Would ticket become like badges of honor and be stored endlessly?

Currently the accumulation rate is way too slow. To spend about 2 years in a row every week 20+ h of WvWvW grind to get a prestige armor, which is not even legendary but merely ascended with cosmetic effects is outrageous grindy.

Most top WvWvW players probably play more than just 1 character e.g. play both guardian and necro. Thus they would need to purchase and obtain prestige armor and legendary backbag for both. Even with the currency conversion basically NO player I know of could afford it to do instantly for multiple characters.

Also according to https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.proofOfHeroics
https://gw2efficiency.com/account/statistics/statistics.badgesOfHonor

Only 0.5 % of GW2 players have 4500 proofs or more and only 0.5 % have over 40500 badges. The number of players who have 10k proofs and 100k badges are extremely few. We are talking something like 1 out of 1000 players or less. Is such a tiny minority a real issue at all since we are talking about account bound stuff!?

Azgarn.2145:

Even if you have CC, other classes like engi and Ele will just Mist Form/ Elixer S stomp you and laugh when you try to CC them where stealth stomping leaves you quite vulnerable.

Stealth stomp is by far more common than what you are now trying to compare it with. During my many hundred hours of WvWvW I have never seen an elementalist do a mist form stomp, nor an engineer do an Elixir S stomp. Both of those skills have a long cooldown and are generally saved for situations where you need to save your own kitten . I see stealth stomps everyday and there is often very little you can do to stop them. If you see a downed ally quite far, sure you can spam some AoE there, but does this kill the stealthed thief… rarely. Fear and hard CC skills like area stun have usually very long cooldowns, thus they are not available when the stealth stomp occurs.

In fact if you would play an engineer or play against engineers, you would realize Elixir S is just a prolonged death wish in WvWvW. If I see an enemy engineer use that skill I know that he will be dead in few seconds after that 3 seconds of invulnerability runs out. My engineer stopped using that skill a long time ago.

Just like some of the previous posters have said: anti-stealth traps are not gonna be a problem for the roaming thief. Too expensive, requires 10 supplies and the cost is just way too high.

The anti-supply trap is another thing. Just look at this new VotF video showing a thief own the enemy teams in WvWvW and denying them supply over and over again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv4P-kTBzE0

Now imagine somebody providing that thief stability or thief providing stealth for his ally full bunker guardian. Enemy teams won’t have any supplies. Gg, and another epic fail from Arenanet.

So in other words: this latest patch gave more power to thieves since they have the best access to stealth. So just relax and you can continue to play Thief Wars 2.

fosfor.9076:

10 badges for 1 ticket conversion ratio it is ok, that will save some WvW veterans for trash out the badges, and reward them with respect because WvW veterans din’t get anything substantial comparing to others, like fractal/raid pve veterans. At least, if Anet continue to support pve gear for wvw, then, completely remove the pve grid part, as the update for runes. But, i will like more WvW exclusive items, as “Mistforged Triumphant Hero’s armor” or “Warbringer” to see in the incoming updates, this will make WvW GREAT AGAIN and is a HUUUGE BIG plus for Anet, i expect many more players to play GW2. Look at the queue for borders, before legendary wvw update was barely 10+ in prime time, now we almost got 100+, this is a huge difference! this is the way!

Desolation has probably the biggest pve population in EU. And we know that many pve players are for shinies.

Desolation didn’t used to have much any queues before legendary WvWvW update. When the update hit, we got queues to all for 4 maps, but those queues died out quick. Within less than 2 weeks from the update, the situation is back to the old one.

In other words: the pve players noticed that it takes way too much grind to get anything decent out of WvWvW. This should be a clear message for the developers. The current speed of obtaining weapon and armor skins from WvWvW is set artificially way to high. The pve population in general couldn’t care less as pve rewards are still far greater than WvWvW rewards.

We can argue whether 20 badges or 10 badges per 1 ticket is the right conversion rate. And how many proofs are equivalent of badges, but we really need a conversion.

100 badges = 1 ticket is a bad joke. I know that some hardcore WvWvWers can get 500-1000 badges per week, but even that would then equal mere 5-10 tickets = close to nothing.

The patch notes are up. There were several good profession balance tweaks, but some weird ones as well. Overall not drastic changes, except retaliation and confusion finally brought back to spvp levels for WvWvW.

Unfortunately the new buffs to siege weapons are just going to make VS even more powerful in tier 1. After all VS is master of superior siege.

The elementalist nerfs and confusion nerf together with the thief changes might make thieves as common as they were in the worst days of culling, about 1/3 of WvWvW players or more playing that profession. And it seems the 5 signet warrior is going to make a comeback.

I don’t see any changes coming to EU tier #1 for for week or two.

Unless something drastic happens, Visunah will win this week, Desolation will be #2 and SFR will be #3. Elona Reach doesn’t want to rise to tier #1 (not surprising, they know how much “fun” it is to fight against VS). And Jade Sea simply won’t have enough
points.

More of the same again, sighs.

“Thanks” Anet. You really “listen” to your players.

Anet: Why NOT contact those few WvWvW commanders who are still active at SFR and Desolation?

Around 10 major guilds have already left SFR: Vcy, Riot, SIN, RG, BOON, ECL, RNV, OSC and NOE. Did I miss some?

And VotF, Dex, Bull, DSD, FG and GH left Desolation.

Even a blind man can see that EU tier #1 is not working as it should. There is NO balance. Servers are getting trashed and Anet just sits on its bottom while the community breaks up.

lorddavito.2395:

It’s quite simple why the warriors and thieves are out of place atm. If you’d watch any of the ESL / League matches you will notice it’s not about pure dps anymore. It’s about bunkering the kitten out of your enemy while every player has a role of SUPPORT, if not heal, then boon-wise. The only reason warriors and thieves are out of any meta team is because they do not give as many boons/heal as other classes can atm.

The damage is still viable and fine, it just lacks support and boons.

Exactly!

Some of the most blatant elite specs and revenants need to be toned down a bit. I hope Arenanet doesn’t buff warrior damage. Warrior has always been capable of some insane bursts and the sustained DPS is good enough. What warrior needs is some added sustain, not too much, but maybe around 10-20 %. Now even if you spec all the defensive traits + utilities, your warrior isn’t that much of a bunker compared to better options and that is a problem. The group utility is mainly just shouts + banners + warhorn. Shout base heal was nerfed in June 2015 trait rework. Warhorn has had multiple nerfs (less vigor, not converting conditions into boons anymore with quick breathing). Warhorn is weak at its current state, making almost all warriors drop it and choose shield instead. Shield is a selfish weapon with no group support.

I would want to see bunker and/or support warrior as one viable choice, not just see warrior as +1 role or burst + flee kind of bruiser.

Excellent posts by the OP. Well worth reading. I wish Arenanet developers would see this.

Here is a comment from a player who also plays thief (besides all those other 7 professions):

The glass cannon argument is moot. It is basically thief defenders saying that all other professions deserve to die if they run glass cannon, but thieves are okay to run low health and thoughness builds, yet get to choose to disengange fights whenever they want.

Damage in WvWvW is much higher due better gear and consumables. You can achieve around 110% which allows pretty massive burst using any profession. For example eviscerate (warrior axe burst) can surely do as much damage as thief’s backstab using exactly same gear setup. The thing is most WvWvW warriors won’t be running pure glass cannon as they would die so easily and unlike thieves they just cannot shadowstep to safety or pop in stealth. Most WvWvW warriors are running more or less PVT (+ some knight) gear, meaning their crit chance and crit % is low.

Learn to play argument is also very misleading. In EU top tiers WvWvW thieves tend to run in pairs. Even if you have high health and 3k+ armor, two good thieves can down and stealth stomp you fast. Most stun break skills and blocks have a high cool down. You can use them to mitigate one burst, but not two. Yes, you can beat 2 bad thieves, but hey you can beat 2 bad players of any profession. The point is: you simply won’t be beating alone 2 good thieves who burst together and high armor won’t help you, it will just give you 1-3 seconds more time to survive, but you will die anycase. Those two thieves can remain stealthed more or less infinitely if they just abuse the smoke combo fields. And they can surprise even the best players if they roam alone.

Some people argue that if a thief ran away you won the fight. But that is not a win. You didn’t get any WXP, no badges, no loot bags. It was a draw. No other profession can choose their fights so easily.

Thieves are okay in tpvp, because you cannot contest points while being stealthed and the burst damage there is much much lower. But there is no question that currently thieves are broken when it comes to WvWvW. And please don’t tell me that thieves are useless in zerg fights or anything else, as that clearly is a learn to play issue and I see lots of thieves in any zerg fight.

I have a very simple solution to solve this problem:
Change stealth so that the stealthed player remains semi-transparent to its enemies, just like it is currently rendered to its allies. Thieves would still get all the benefits related to stealth (cannot be targeted, burst from stealth, possible condition cleansing and healing etc). And at the same time remove all stealth traps as it is unfair to have a trap which pretty much breaks one profession (so many good things thief has are tied to stealth, total stealth denial is very bad for them).

This would promote more skill play and variation as landing those backstabs would become more difficult e.g. 1st immobilize the opponent and then stealth and then land backstab or use something else!

The combo fields in general should be addressed when it comes to WvWvW, since that is one the key reasons why melee train type of zergs are so powerful (might stacking, area retaliation, heals via water fields etc). Yes, I am talking about those eles, guardians and warriors now, who usually make the back bone of the zerg. I think the combo fields need to be toned down around 50% or we will continue to see blob after blob. Developers should do some testing and possible nerf the duration of combo field boons by 50% and/or reduce their effectiveness by 50%.

He probably wants to play outside the prime hours. While FSP is a full power house at prime time, their coverage is still weaker compared to servers like SFR or Deso. Every gold/silver server blobs, but Desolation is probably the least blobby of all top servers, because our PuGs just want to go their own way, skirmish etc. Desolation does a lot of small scale player vs door + few enemies outside the prime time. So there is always something going on.

Actually I don’t recommend him to move to so called good roaming servers, because he will sooner or later find that enemy servers he will be facing have much less similar roamers and only few gank teams to duel with. I really don’t see the point of rolling a Feature of the Month build and then teaming up with equally minded buddies to gank poor enemy “roamers”, who are equipped with a zerg build. FotM build used to be perplexity thief, now it is PU or mantra of distraction of mesmer. GS/hammer warriors, meditation guardians, d/d elementalists are also very popular. Playing such build with your buddies displays no skill of whatsoever, even if you manage to win 1 vs 2 or 2 vs 4, especially when most enemies are PuGs, who just happen to be there. From my point of view the roamers main task is to flip as many objectives are possible (camps, towers, keeps) and deny supply from enemy. And #StompForDeso (Desolation gets a lot of points from stomps).

If I see enemy ganking squad on “my” map, I will most likely turn on my tag and come to kill them with larger numbers or summon help otherwise. 5 PuGs vs 3 enemy gankers. Fair game.

Sovereign.1093:

the terain is fun to put an ambush, you can have 5 man parties taking these nodes and often in tc, we’d fight db and fa other 5 man teams

I get that you are playing for TC, which is – surprise surprise – leading the match up against FA and DB by a large margin. No surprise that the players on the winning side are having “fun”. Talk about power creep.

I am not at all surprised that majority of the players, who like the new changes are playing on a server, which is A) leading the match up and has bloodlust buff on them.

I have had countless of small scale fights before this patch (note I am 90% solo roamer in WvWvW). And they were more fun. Now the fun is gone.

zen.6091:

Stomping crash course for all classes—

Tricky classes

Thief – Main skill teleport, just start stomping, then move to teleport location. Second downed skill is stealth, just wait for it to end at same location after a few seconds, and keep attacking in the meantime. If the thief happens to put down a shadow refuge right before they die, they will be invisible for 10-15 seconds. Make sure to keep spamming the area with AoE or CC, and wait there if you see a very low health thief go stealth under a log cabin animation basically.

Ele – Main skill mist form. Start stomping, follow, stomp. They can move quite far and through gates, and are invulnerable while moving though. Second skill is useless.

Mesmer – Main skill clone (and also short invis). Start stomping, first character to appear is clone, second is the real mesmer. CAUTION, downed mesmers can stack a ridiculous amount of confusion if you try to auto attack them dead. Always go for the stomp. Second skill also does a kitten load of damage. Make mesmer dead asap when downed.

Control classes. All can be bypassed with stability or invulnerability. All but guardian can be bypassed with stealth, unless someone else is stomping too with ranger.

Necro – Main skill single target fear, second skill pretty much useless.

Guardian – Main skill pushes all nearby foes back. Second skill can heal the guardian very fast to a rally, so get them down.

Ranger – First skill dazes all stompers, but it needs to be targeted (unlike guardian). Second skill heals the ranger very fast, so get them down.

Warrior – First skill single target KD, second skill rallies the warrior for 15 seconds. If they pop vengeance just run away, the job is done.

Engineer – First skill interrupts and pulls one target…to the engineer. Second skill is a blowout. By far the easiest stomp…poor engis.

Excellent summary. I just want to correct one mistake:
The engineer’s first downed skill, throw junk, is a 900 ranged attack, which inflicts a random condition on the foe. Not totally useless, but it rarely gives you rally.
The 2nd engineer downed skill, grappling line, pulls a single foe to the downed engineer. What a useless skill. When you are downed, you want enemies away from you, not near you. When I play a thief, shadow escape (thief downed skill #2), has saved me many times.
The 3rd engineer downed skill, booby trap, plants mines around the engineer. Pretty useful, but you die anycase if you get chance to use it.

And yes, engineers have the weakest downed state in the game. If you get downed, you die unless team mates come to rescue. Thief, mesmer and elementalist have the best downed states. And they are also probably the most common professions in spvp and far more common in WvWvW compared to engineers. Anet doesn’t know how to balance the game and doesn’t listen to its players.

If you want to stomp a thief, just spam AoE where he is or use ranged attack while he is visible. Quickly change target if he uses shadow escape. If he enters stealth during stomping, just continue to stomp (repress F), you will stomp that thief.

Excellent post by Sylosi.6503. I hope the developers will read it. The engineer traits are generally weak when compared to other professions. And having just 3 utility slots, which are often spent to kits, don’t give us enough real utility. Any effective engineer builds needs to be very specialized, not making it versatile, like the Anet envisioned.

Deniara