Guild Wars 2

These changes fall far from the mark in terms of balance, active play, counterplay, and overall variety. Sorry, but it’s true.

smithkt.8062:

Why is this topic even still open? It’s a ridiculous complaint and just plain rude.

Karl gets me the info I need. I don’t need a professional actor to do it. Keep up the good work Karl.

^

Pixels.6532:

Archaon.6245:

Attention and rewards for casuals is what destroyed gw2 pvp..just saying…

That’s absolutely incorrect. No sense of urgency in fixing broken specs and a penchant for creating easy specs that are far too effective is what is destroying gw2.

A healthy and large base of casual players is necessary for any pvp to survive. Do you suppose the 32m yearly LoL players are all pros? The millions of concurrent viewership for championships is all sponsored players?

If GW2 wants to be esports it needs 2 things.
1. Large, healthy population of people who will tune in to watch tournies (this is why you need a large casual player base, pro teams only have so many grandmas who will tune it)

2. Frequent balance updates to ensure certain specs and classes aren’t out of line with others.

The rewards updates are steps in the right direction for #1. It’s #2 that’s currently lacking.

I absolutely agree! A large fanbase who also plays the game is what the game needs to succeed both from a gameplay aspect and from an ‘esports’ aspect.

Nice, thanks Allie.

Bag allowance seems pretty generous o.o 40 per team win

Chaith.8256:

My agenda is to play GW2 in a way that whether it’s me or the enemy, there is going to be a conclusion to a good amount of fights. I absolutely do have a dislike for slow paced games where there are very few kills. Give me a high damage slug fest any day.

I’m definitely not alone on this either. Some just either don’t know the cancer it brings, or play Bunker Guard.

You mean like in WTS where you just suicided off tanks on all nodes and won by stalling out the games because all your builds had to be 1v2ed, like Minstrel’s Druids? Ohhhhhhhh

But wait, Minstrels Druid/Guardian couldn’t even kill people or decap nodes 1v1

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

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

Josh Davis.6015:

So, let’s say we wanted to look into decap engineer, where would we start? I’ve heard a few different opinions on the topic, and I have a few opinions of my own as someone who has played against decap in top 100 rated solo/team arena games and also played the build myself.

In the same way that it was difficult to look at the September ’13 Hambow warrior and point out a single specific key to its strength, I think decap engineer is much the same.

I think it’s important to understand the areas in our game where decap engineer is strong, and then go from there:

• Conquest
  • Situations where communication is difficult (solo arena)
  • Against teams that have difficulty rotating appropriately

So, with the above in mind, what are some ‘low-hanging fruit’ type of suggestions for changing the way decap engineer works, without affecting existing builds unrelated to decap? That is to say, suggestions that would not require significant amounts of development time to implement.

We’ve already seen a few threads on PW, so I’ll focus on decap for now. ^^

A really good place to start would be Automated Response. This is a terrible trait that needs to be removed, and engies need to be given more active condition removal.

This would simultaneously fix AR Engies being extraordinarily annoying to fight against as a condition class, but also make more of their builds better against the Necromancer which hard counters them.

The specific strength of warrior since September has and continues to be combustive shot turning cleansing Ire into a 100% guaranteed condi removal. All good warriors have realized this and this is why you will only see longbow specs until combustive shot is nerfed.

holy great wall of text china

- Leave Skyhammer in the rotation as an utterly broken map
-Refuse to add the obvious solution for 4v5s (functional readyup button)
-Add standard models to team queue and custom arenas only (???what)
-Leave leaderboards in a broken state that punishes players for playing multiple games per day.

Basically, arenanet doesn’t give a single kitten about your solo queue experience. All of these things could be fixed in one day. ONE day.

“Play Now” should redirect players to an unrated queue where they can play solo or with friends in a party.

Hotjoin can be left as is, with manual join via the game browser.

Well, stealth killshot thief might add at least a hundred hours of hilarious troll capability to WvW.

You’d think that a company that says they like to balance by shaving wouldn’t look at a trait for 5 days and then nerf it by 400%. I mean I’d have understood 6, 8, maybe even 10 seconds… wtf

I agree, mesmers have been terrorizing total noobs for far too long. Perhaps make them do 80% less damage to players who have played for under 100 hours.

So you played one of the trolliest/rage inducing builds to fight against and then get upset when people get mad at you?

/logic

39. Arenanet does a great job helping the tournament scene to grow.

It’s kind of odd how MMO players think of grind = prestige. Rank 55 takes a long time to get. I’ve played 3500 pvp games, which probably averaged around 10 minutes or more factoring in queue times and I’m rank 51

That = 600 hours just in pvp, Rank 55 would probably be close to 700-800 hours.

Compare that to ‘max prestige’ in CoD which these guys got in 4 days: http://www.gamingupgrade.com/the-first-10th-prestige-players-in-call-of-duty-ghosts-otrademark-pwnstarzdotcom/

John Corpening.9847:

Thanks for the post infantrydiv. Your take on the situation is incredibly insightful and well thought out. I really appreciate your constructive feedback on where the game is and where it should go to accomodate players at all levels.

Do you feel that Solo Arena has any benefit to a player for learning how to play as a team?

Thanks for the response! I do think that solo queue helps players learn and have appreciation for the conquest game type, far better than hotjoin does, but also slightly less than team queue would.

From my perspective, the skill required to play this game can be broken into three parts:

1. Mechanical: Has to do with APM, keybinds, cooldown/activation time knowledge, muscle memory. This is the ‘sport’ aspect of the game, where faster reaction times lead to better performance.

2. Tactical: Knowledge about matchups, other classes skills, positioning in a fight. Examples would be: knowing how to position correctly on a necromancer, knowing how a hammer warrior attempts to CC chain, knowing what a thief heal looks like and how to interrupt it

3. Strategic: Map awareness, opening plays, splits, regrouping mid-game, knowing when it is acceptable to push far, when to lord rush, etc.

I think playing Solo Queue will clearly increase your performance both mechanically and tactically, but from a strategic standpoint it is lacking compared to team queue.

The main reason behind this is that generally with team queues you decide on a set opening split, who should be responsible for getting which buffs. If you overextend in team queues, many times your teammates will help correct your strategic knowledge. In solo queue, I see players ranked even in the top 100 who still do not understand basic splits or rotations.

One of my own experiences when I was new in solo queue was when I was learning to play thief. I picked up the thief class and thought “Ok this is the Assassin class, my job must be to assault far point all game and duel whoever is there”. Now, as many top PvPers could tell you, the role of thief is not as farpoint assaulter. Thief is supposed to roam between home and mid, cleaning up fights fast and decap far when it is empty. I probably played 200 solo queue games before I finally understood this to be the thief’s role, when just playing one team queue with good players, they probably would have told me what to do immediately (“Stop getting into fights on a capped far point!”).

Lots of people want dueling. Why not modify the idea of the gauntlet and allow people to fight each other? Let others bet money on fight outcomes, etc. Have gambits accessible as well.

It would be a good way for people to practice their pvp skills and also fun for others to watch and interact with through betting, etc.

Threads like this… probably the reason why Ranger remains bad.

Abjured is a team playing to win. I think one of the biggest things about them was they were comfortable modifying builds to suit their opponents. We saw Chaith move from a Glass build to a tanky Soldiers build and there were also appearances of D/F ele as opposed to D/D.

Comp wise, oRNG was always at a disadvantage. Warrior is weak right now, and double Guardian is not ideal. Burn guardian in particular is weak vs Elementalist, Necro, and Thief. I have no idea why the casters were going on about it being a strong point for oRNG because it could kill Chaith. It’s a 1v1 build that was weak vs 4 members of the other team in 1v1. We even saw it lose 1v1 to Zan’s soldier Engineer earlier. ROM felt like he was constantly on the run for his life and was rarely a strong positive for his team. His build seemed a bit too ham, especially vs a hybrid sustain comp like the Abjured. oRNG had a comp well suited to play vs the EU meta but it seems like they put no thought at all into modifying it versus a completely different playstyle like Abjured’s.

Temple being a map also increased Abjured’s chances by a LOT. People saying that Abjured is carried by double Ele are absolutely correct: without the absurd amount of sustain, dps and support that an ele brings, their comp starts to fall apart. Since their inception they have been based around using Ele to create a 3 point push strat where they have good chances in all 1v1s and winning 2v2 matchups by pairing an ele with a necro or engineer. Yes, we saw them try playing a team fighting comp with DPS guardian and power necro for a few months, but we also never saw this comp vs WTS tier teams.

In the end, did Abjured deserve to win? I’d say so. Yes, double elementalist is extremely strong, but they also bring a necromancer and an engineer running unique builds, both of which are considered less meta than say, shatter mesmer. Toker was clearly the best thief in the tournament. I felt like their victory was also partially due to their willingness to adapt, and the enemy’s complete unwillingness to change comps or playstyles, and that’s also part of the game.

Other than Celestial/Marauders which are utterly dominating the meta, there is a lack of functioning condition or tanking amulets. We see occasional Carrion on Necromancers, but that’s about it.

There needs to be more 4 stat amulets with some toughness and vitality, as well as more hybrid-type amulets that allow for builds that can’t use all of celestial’s stats to do well. We already have all the burst type amulets we need with Sinisters, Berserkers, and Marauders.

New more useful amulets that would help in making viable options aside from Celestial and Marauder:

Medic’s Amulet: Basically a Cleric’s amulet but exchanging some toughness for increased Vitality.

+1050 power
+1050 healing power
+560 toughness
+560 vitality

Wraith’s Amulet: Just a nice cross between Carrion/Rabid

+1050 condition damage
+1050 power
+560 toughness
+560 vitality

Mercenary Amulet: Standard balanced power damage amulet, has been needed for ages.

+1050 Power
+560 Ferocity
+560 Precision
+560 Toughness
+560 Vitality

Occultist’s Amulet: An improved Rabid amulet for classes with very low HP.

+1050 condition damage
+1050 toughness
+560 vitality
+560 precision

Seer’s Amulet: More balanced Settler’s type amulet with less toughness.

+1050 condition damage
+1050 healing power
+560 vitality
+560 toughness

Raider’s Amulet: Slightly tankier Marauder’s amulet with toughness instead of ferocity.
+1050 power
+1050 precision
+560 toughness
+560 vitality

Good luck seeing any of the amulets below ever in serious builds due to serious stat conflictions or redundancies. Very bad amulets which could most likely be removed:

Barbarian
Cavalier
Magi
Rampager
Vigilant

tom.7468:

Cygnus.6903:

People saying that thief needs more risk added to them should try playing one.

Couldn’t had said it any better myself. If they mean the ones not even in combat then thats common sense they cant perma stealth while fighting.

If you think thief is risky, you’re playing it wrong.

This skill is decent, but with the amount of boon rip/boon steal, 20 seconds of stability on a 120 second cooldown simply is not practical.

It would be much nicer to half the stability/fury time and then make the cooldown of the skill 50 seconds instead, so that it works similar to the Warrior Elite signet.

10 seconds of stability on a 50 second cooldown would be much less stability up time than a warrior, but having it stolen wouldn’t be quite as devastating due to the shortened cooldown.

ronpierce.2760:

I’m a warrior, Whirl is a mother effer. Didn’t have to stand in it.

Yeah…times are tough for warrior right now… with things like berserker’s stance and perma stun and 1k health per second regen

eye roll

Nier.8741:

What is the point of buffing ranger when it’s going to be anti-fun at it’s current state? Ranger isn’t a viable class but it also doesn’t take skill to play and is just way too forgiving in design. Look at spirit ranger as an example.

What you Ranger mains should be asking for is a REWORK not a buff. Make ranger HARD TO PLAY like a dota-character type of pet system.

P.S they don’t have team fight cleave, sure. But they have access to quickness stomps and res.

Rangers have been asking for full pet control and more interesting mechanics for linear weapons like shortbow basically since launch. We also never asked for ridiculous mechanics like automatic weakness and protection on hit (like the new protective ard trait)

1. No such thing as hotjoin

2. Unrated solo queue until rank 20 (or 30). Similar to the LoL system

3. Ranked solo/team queue after 20 or 30+

4. A set of three small arenas for 2v2 and 3v3 matches which would be best of 3 with a 5 minute timer on each match, team with most damage dealt wins in case of a stalemate

5. A ladder system with actual decay

6. Custom arenas for dueling practice/player run tournaments

7. A spectator system which lets people observe the highest ranked team queue matches. High ranked players could have the option to hide or show their builds.

8. A decent tutorial system/ maybe bot practice matches?

9. More achievements and titles

I’m still waiting on most of these things, and so is the rest of the community.

I’m making a new topic about this because I think it deserves a discussion all by itself.

Ranger has long had good access to regeneration through skills such as Healing Spring, Fern Hound, and now Shouts, Water Spirit, and traited Warhorn. Really, Regen has become a defining thematic boon for the Ranger.

Currently, Regeneration is not counted towards healing charging for Druid’s Celestial Avatar form. If it was, we could charge the form with a variety of Shout builds, Trap Builds and even by using traited Warhorn 5 efficiently. It would really open up Druid build variety and still give preference to builds bringing a focus upon healing and Healing Power

The amount of charging from Regen doesn’t have to be as high as it is from straight healing, but at least some amount would create much more synergy between Druid and Ranger’s preexisting traitlines.

What are people’s thoughts about this? I can’t really see how it’s a bad idea, and it would make a characteristically weak boon much stronger in the Ranger’s hands.

I have yet to see a top team start doing really well with a power ranger. So please, just because you don’t know how to dodge rapid fire in your hotjoins doesn’t make you qualified to come on here and talk about how OP ranger is.

If we start seeing teams running 2 (or more) power rangers, like cough cough warrior, ele cough, cough then you can come on the forums are start whining.

Mikau.6920:

To staves they could do a “4 elemental” effects to fit as ele and a “genesis” staff to fit as guard.

Yes, I have no idea why we don’t have staves with nice elemental effects yet.

vVv Gaming Presents: Kings of The Mists 10/19

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/events/vVv-Gaming-Presents-Kings-of-The-Mists-10-19

I figured this should be posted here since I doubt a lot of people ever visit the PvP Events forum.

There are some good teams playing and Blu is shoutcasting so it should be a good time!

fishball.7204:

mesmers are bad.

Right there!!!

Power ranger is terrible. Terrible.

Most classes should be able to easily gap close with it. The only one I can think of which cant very easily is necromancer.

Also: projectile attacks have all sorts of counters with the numerous reflections in the game.

The fact is, ranger bows are clearly already balanced around the fact that the enemy SHOULD get hit a few times by the bow before they get close. I feel like everyone forgets this with ranged classes… What good is running a bow if you can literally just strafe it forever until you gap close?

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

The devs for this game have shown time and time again that they are utterly clueless about what it takes to create a competitive infrastructure for a game.

If you’re a solo player, a player that cares about actual rating (MMR), a player that doesn’t have time to play many games per day, or a player who doesn’t want to put up with long queues while being forced to do nothing else in game, then Guild Wars 2 is no longer the game for you.

It’s just the truth.

Fortus.6175:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Belial.9350:

I agree, 4 thieves should never be on a team together because that team can’t hold any points and is almost a sure loss. Fortunately the screenshotted team went against a team that didn’t know how to play.

Its basically my favorite backpiece ever and I wasn’t playing actively when it was added…

Do you think there is any chance they will release it again??

Seriously, just answer the kittening question instead of getting all kitteny that people are disrespecting your staff. They aren’t, we just wanna know.

I totally agree… Less conditions and less condition removal would be an amazing thing for the game from a tactical and positioning standpoint… Imagine if getting a cripple or chill on someone meant you could actually kite them. Imagine if you got torment stacked it would actually make your opponent want to stay still. Imagine if poison was an actual counter to healing and bunker builds. It would be nice.

Drekor.5217:

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

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

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

Simply put, you don’t.

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

Yeah, if they add more damage maybe not. But either way, if the heals get dropped base and increase the healing power scaling then this change to IR would really help out. You would be able to run only zealots armor (15% crit damage drop) with zerk trinkets and still have 700 healing power. Which should be enough to heal reasonably well, plus you have the other support. Not only with Druid, but it helps roaming builds and all builds that use Nature Magic, in fact. All these traits should scale off a Primary stat.

My point is that they want the Druid to spec for healing. They clearly do not want a druid build to have the same offensive capability a vanilla ranger will while still maintaining a solid level of ally healing.

Expecting them to give it to you is a pipe dream at best.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

By the very nature of Druid’s Celestial Avatar, even if outside the form you had good damage potential, as soon as you go in, you are doing pure healing. Druid would only have top damage and healing output if they somehow put giant amounts of damage on the Druid skills, which we know isnt going to happen. And clearly, just by taking Druid you are giving up either Marksmanship, Skirmishing, or Beast Mastery, all of which would be required to do top DPS as a ranger…

What people do want is for Druid to be able to contribute offensively somewhat in PvP/WvW/PvE while still being able to heal well inside of the Celestial form.

I agree OP, Panic Strike should not be a grandmaster trait. It’s a decent trait, but if you look at the thief’s other grandmaster traits they are things which can really define a build, like executioner or hidden killer. I’d like to see Panic Strike moved to X, and have a completely new possibly condition focused trait in the GM tier

People in this game act completely irrationally. They think that burst builds touting large amounts of RNG sigil procs and crit are somehow more skillful than conditions, and it’s always been like that. If you look at WoW the tables are flipped and people consider DoT specs to take just as much or if not more skill than yolo burst specs.

For example people complained endlessly about stuff like Dhuumfire and Sun Spirit, but when everyone suddenly started running Fire/Air sigils which did far more comparable RNG damage, berserker builds were still “the most skillful”.

Ultimately it comes down to the fact that Conditions are extremely powerful if the opponent doesn’t have adequate condi clear compared to power damage. And that’s because Arenanet has given many builds spammable condi clear, so unless conditions are very strong, they would have no chance as a viable option.

TL;DR People hate conditions because there is too much condi clear available in the game, but if you don’t take it, conditions will destroy you (because conditions had to be overtuned to compensate for stuff like D/D ele, shoutbow spammable condi clear)

Nary Why Irk.8150:

come on anet. r70 make it dragon.

Are you kidding me? You have like half as many games played as a lot of 70s. By your own logic, why do you think you should be rewarded the same as they are?

ArrDee.2573:

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

Yes the guaranteed 3 condis removed every 8 seconds giant aoe that envelops more than the entire point that applies burning and does the same damage as an Eviscerate throughout the entire duration and is a catalyst for insane might stacks! It’s fine!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

I love you vee wee xD

1. Visible MMR leaderboards
2. Rated SOLO and TEAM queue
3. Be able to queue from anywhere.

Nova Stiker.8396:

xDudisx.5914:

From hardest to easiest:

1)Engi
2)Ele
3)Necro
4)Thief
5)Ranger
6)Guardian
7)Mesmer
8)Warrior

This.
Engineers used to be one of the easier classes. As they had the best recovery in the game from Healing Turret and Gear Shield on a 16 second recharge. Made a mistake on an engineer? It’s k bro, make all the mistakes you want on last meta Engineer. Obviously this meta, that is not the case.

---

LOL at all the scrubs winning Elementalist by mashing buttons. True story, I beat a dude on my ele by swapping attunements and mashing buttons with 1000 ping too. I was in WvW against a level 12 first time Mesmer, dem ele’s are ez class.

Here is another true story, I never lost to a bad Elementalist no matter what build or class I was using. The fact is, anyone can beat a scrub, even if you are one yourself.

True story, mine was in a high MMR queue. Saying D/D elementalist is ‘hard’ is a joke since it’s literally the easiest thing in the game to be effective on currently. Defending it when double ele is probably the most common comp in the game is also a joke. There’s no doubt that Elementalist has a high skillcap, but that doesn’t matter when you can play it like garbage and still be more effective than classes you have 10x the games on.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Those were the high level changes, meaning we didn’t get into all the details for each profession (each and every # change), each weapon, each skill, etc. We were just trying to move through a lot of info in the Ready Up, so we didn’t get down into each and every # change for every class. That would be more of a detailed list you’d expect from game release notes for a release, for example.

Some of you have asked why we haven’t focused on fixing the issues already in the game. A lot of things have been fixed, but some concerns you guys have like with PW, HS, decap engi, etc. we decided to wait and see how the new traits will affect the meta.

This does not mean that we aren’t open to adjusting them.

Ultimately, we knew we wanted to add some more traits, so we wanted to focus on trying to make those good and then we can revisit them if they are still an issue. Does that make sense?

No. Decap engineer and Pistol Whip needs to be hotfixed. These builds are toxic. Pistol Whip is just broken while Decap engi makes a mockery of conquest.

You need to fix this builds ASAP. That means nerf the kitten out of them in the feature patch if you still have time.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Helly.2597:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Yep. The only puzzle piece left for this is making it so the sound will play through the ‘Mute game while minimized’ option. Then it will be caaaaaaaaaake.

Could there be another option that allows you to check a box that says “Play notification sounds even while minimized”? I’m not sure the difficulties around such a change, but then such a thing could be added to all queues (overflow/wvw/spvp/etc) and still leave growth for whatever else comes up during the games growth that could be classified as a notification.

Yes, you are describing the functionality that we need

This is something I don’t understand: how do you guys prioritize things? Notifications are a nice-to-have, but in the customer’s eyes, extremely low priority when compared to fixing 4v5’s, providing better match-making, new maps, bug fixes for trebuchets, profession balances, profession bug fixes, etc.

For example, take a look at the new heals added. There’s multiple, glaring profession imbalances, many profession traits that are broken or useless, many profession bugs (some horrible ones!), and what does the Balance Team do – spend, presumably, man-months of effort making new heal spells.

Where are your priorities and why are they not aligned with what the community wants?

Sound notifications on tournament queue pop is a key part of fixing 4v5 games.