Guild Wars 2

There’s a reason why thieves and mesmers are so prevalent in pvp lol

I have an armor rating of 2682, and i am getting critically hit by thieves up to 12k? What gives?? I am stacking toughness to defend against this crap and still am getting dropped faster than i can even counter it. Unless i am doing something wrong, i am getting close to uninstalling this game. I dont mean to rage or anything but there appears to be a serious WvW balance issue. The average hit from them is around 4k but still with how fast they strike it kills me 4-kittens.

It’s because of the silly amount of crit dmg that you can stack in WvW. Max dmg thieves are usually super glassy though so if you can survive the initial burst, they will look for another victim. I won’t say you will outright kill them if you survive the burst since many run max stealth specs.

Getting perma stunned / feared at full duration gets old really fast, make it so the first one is full duration, next one in 3-5sec is half effect and another in 3-5 sec is zero , that way you cant get spammed and brings back a bit fun

On AplaNET

fifteen char

On what planet does it make sense to still have immobile stack the way it does? Its still completely kittening kittened.

I really like playing support, but any heavy support build here not only tends to be subpar (in most cases) but they’re also slow gameplay wise and not at all as hectic and fun as the typical healing playstyle in MMOs. Not to mention the fact that the lack of non-group heals etc. makes the supporting less personal. (This all from a PvP perspective — both in this game and in others).

Am I really the only one who feels this way, or have others sharing my sentiment done the sensible thing and accepted that we’ll never get that in GW2?

Boon and Condition Duration is capped at 100%.
You can already stack up to 168% Boon Duration in total, wasting 68%.

I dont see a point why you would want to stack to 174%.

Before I get into any details, I’d like to ensure one thing. Are you conscious about the total uselessness of defensive healing-supporters in PvE?

Since you are new to the game, I’ll elaborate that point a bit: In GW2 PvE, you can avoid virtually all dangerous attacks by active defenses or intelligent positioning. Active defense means the dodge roll, aegis/other blocks, projectile reflections/absorbers or blinding trash mobs. Additionally, healing power and defensive stats scale badly – you won’t be able to outheal anything, except maybe a rabbit outdoors (but beware the Fractal rabbit!), and many things will simply oneshot you, no matter how pseudo-tanky you are.

As a consequence of all this, good players go full offensive in gear and traits, doing all the necessary support via utility skills and some few traits that fit nicely into offensive builds. Defensive builds are a crutch for bad players or those who are at the very beginning of learning GW2. But even in the case of the latter, learning an offensive build from the start will be much more useful.

As for good PvE builds, please have a look at obal’s guide:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Guide-DPS-Guardian-for-PVE/first

Dont play support in this game, is pretty boring. All are AoE effects, auto effects or persistent auras. I used play support role in every game, i love to play support, this game is not for support players, is for “all dps” classes.

Where was BB/AR population on reset?
Was expecting huge blobs.

Then again we finally have a chance to fight like WvW was supposed to be fought. havn’t seen groups bigger then 30 running around and that makes fighting incredibly interesting.

Cheers to non blobs atm,.

A very useful table.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats#Dungeons

Garrisyl.7402:

Meglobob.8620:

Condition damage kills you slow.

5k/sec condi necro dissaggrees.

5k/sec condi necro would need 7 seconds to kill my warrior. That’s without counting any stun, shout (that cleanses conditions) and use of the warhorn. Well…i guess it’s not that OP, is it ?

Meglobob.8620:

Condition damage kills you slow.

5k/sec condi necro dissaggrees.

Immobilise needs to be looked at. Not fun having huge durations of it

Moleless.1462:

As a few people have mentioned, it’s not at all an issue in large scales fights. Condi’s dont stick inside a zerg.

Small scale combat is a completely different story. The condi pressure that some classes can apply is just straight up ridiculous. I’m specced almost entirely to counter conditions, yet conditions are still by far the biggest issue for me in small fights. You can’t counter conditions at all. The current condi meta allows for no counter play, and that’s pretty much the definition of a broken mechanic.

Not to mention, the whole playstyle in general is jsut so anti-fun. In my opinion, conditions should be relegated to soft CC only. Condi damage is just completely over the top.

I want to like that post a second time

I won’t say I am 100% thrilled with every decision ANet has made for the game, but I will say how glad I am to see people posting something other than rants on the forums.

I hold the belief that people who love and enjoy the game are to busy playing it to waste time complaining on the forums.

Perhaps we should take some time to let ANet know that there are people who really enjoy the game, since if you go by the forums, that would be hard to tell, sometimes.

Holy crap that was a lot, but TL;DR

- Hammer trains strong due to condition cleanse stacking and access to strong levels of crit damage on top of the strong control.
- Small Scale fights favor strong condition builds and extreme crit damage stacking. Survival is based upon skill and profession-based abilities.
- Giving Crit Damage a Curve, and making Group based Condition Cleanses more self-based would put all these issues at rest.
- Self-Based condition cleanse encourages more skill in Large Scale Fights and opens the door for more condition-stacking professions as opposed to pure rampart hammer trains.
- Crit Damage is taken advantage of across the board, creating a curve reduces the abundant strength of hammer trains while at the same time only giving power to those purely stacking crit damage to reach similar power levels they had before. Since self-condition cleanse is buffed as per my suggestion, crit damage stacking in small scale is not entirely nerfed to the ground and brought in line.

Holy crap I typed a lot. I don’t think I can continue at this time to talk about Siege. I think I gave you guys enough to bite on, go ahead!

Thus, the following are the imbalances at this time:

- Many Damaging conditions are negated in large-scale combat thanks to high amounts of condition cleanse, encouraging the hammer train meta which is also quite strong (Emphasis on raw base damage and tankiness are high).
- Conditions are just about king in small-scale, with extreme raw damage with no tankiness to match as well. Tanky specs are hit or miss based on the situation.

Thanks to the above imbalances, WvW starts to become binary across many levels.

So what’s the solution?

Well, after some consideration I came up with some culprits. I can’t tell if you are going to hate me after this but…luckily you can discuss your disfavor for me after.

- Crit Damage is a problem.
- Group Condition Cleanse is a problem.

…How many of you are downvoting me? I can feel the bad vibes from here-

ANYWAYS, so I probably have you hating me right now, but let me explain. First, Crit Damage at this point in time is extremely strong. It is one thing if the defensive stats like Toughness or even Vitality could affect critical damage in some manner, but unlike Crit Damage, Toughness has a curve on its damage reduction. Crit damage only gets better at higher amounts whereas Toughness gets worse per point, this is why you see threads about toughness guardians going ‘WTF’ when they get bursted down by Berserker-strong Professions. This crit damage is also prevalent not just in small-scale but large scale as well, as an easy damage stat for the tanky hammer trains to get a hold of.

Sooooo….

Change Crit Damage to have diminishing returns.

At this point in time without any extra crit damage the base line for critical damage is at 150%. I do not want to do all the numbers at this point in time, but I imagine having the curve start bending at about 50% might be barely enough to reduce the overall damage of a zerg impact if stacking PVT. …Oh right traits, those should affect the curve as well. The numbers I am thinking about are about a 20% extra crit damage from a typical PVT Soldier Warrior with cava/berserker/valk trinkets. Plus whatever percent from traits. Looking anywhere from a 15-20% hit in the crit damage department for those pesky hammers.

Whereas for classes running full berserker would have a very hard time hitting 100% extra. Actually that might still be a bit too high, just because health pools for the majority of classes are really low. But that’s my personal opinion, there just needs to be some sort of nerf to put crit damage in line with every other stat.

Group condition cleanse makes the many instances of conditions being tossed out useless, a competent hammer train can ignore the vast majority of conditions. Between the rune sets and the group utilities, conditions really need help in large scale combat. But they are pretty kitten good in small-scale…hmmm…

Change some group condition cleanses to stronger self cleanses.

I do not want to completely diminish hammer trains, but I do want the playing field even for many more builds and possibilities. Between hitting crit damage and encouraging self-skill based condition cleanse in large scale fights WvWers will see a greater depth of skill from coordinating large scale fights since everyone will also have to deal with their own conditions themselves, and even favor bringing in different professions.

I think I did miss another key problem with stability, but considering the scale of change if these two solutions I came up with were to pass, the imbalance might be shifted enough so that rather than stability becoming a problem, it becomes just a benefit of running a hammer train in a stronger condition based WvW meta.

AND, encouraging stronger self-cleanses can help deal with the problematic dominance of conditions in the small-scale, though having an extra condition cured or something along those lines does not save you from having a lack of skill…

Message Body Lengths OP, read TL;DR down below.

Sup.

So, according to the title I bet many of you are assuming I might make a long winded post about various observations with concern to the WvW meta, or what has become the ‘next big thing’ in WvW. For those not informed, the meta is everything from ‘Hammer Trains’ to ‘Golem Rushes’…just the general perceived notions everyone acknowledges in WvW.

Right now, everyone can agree that there is an imbalance. Everything from Profession viability, common builds, from small scale to large scale fights, and so forth. There is just a lot of imbalance that goes on it is hard to put it all into one thread. So effectively your first assumption that my opening post would be long is correct. Luckily, I am a nice guy, so I know of a few ways to make you not want to read a wall of text. I will have TL;DRs or short summaries of my observations and solutions at the end of each segment. So commence cheering now.

Better yet, I will make this even simpler:

If you do not think the current WvW meta is imbalanced, feel free to skip most everything I have to say, and post why you think so! Terrific, I saved you time. Your welcome.

For those curious enough…here goes. I would get some chips, this is going to take a lot to digest.

WvW Meta Concept 1: Large Group Fights Versus Small Group Fights, Condition Damage versus Raw Damage

So I lumped two different conversations together because there is a large relationship between the two. Sweet.

So the current meta stands that at this point in time, ‘Hammer Trains’ have taken the large-group fights by storm. ….Yes there are some large groups that stack a lot of necromancers and elementalists to do incredible AoE and Well stacking but it seems a various amount of guilds that zerg-bust or plain out zerg abuse Guardian/Warrior stacking with the hammers. Oh the hammers, so many hammers. Hammers as a weapon set have an amazing amount of control and base damage (with a slow swing) on their own right, and control in a large group fight is pretty much the key to winning any engagement. You yourself might be skilled enough to see that front line rush you with leaps and smacks, to dodge effectively and avoid the impact. But over the context of just hammering into dozens of people, the hammer train quickly gains the ‘rally advantage’. (Rally Advantage is the tide of the battle where one side has a better state of getting rallies off the enemy. Where the other side just cannot quite finish people off, thus losing the fight overall. I won’t talk about Rally and its pros and cons here, I feel there are plenty of threads that dive into it.)

The power of the many hammers is also coupled with the innate tankiness of the classes abusing it, where they have enough utilities and just enough other professions to keep the train rolling. It’s not difficult to be able to run such a successful meta train, the problem lies in the fact there is not enough of a counter to handle such a thing. Some of the necro-stacking zerg-bust guilds made their comps around dealing with such trains, but the hammer train is too effective in large scale fights.

…Which is funny when you considering small scale. Fights where orange swords are not drawn, the inverse occurs. Normally in a large scale fight, the hammer trains or really any organized 20+ man guild equips itself with plenty of condition cleanse. Condition cleanse is extremely powerful in large zerg fights, and facilitates the need for running hammer trains to zerg bust with.

In small-scale combat though, there is not enough condition cleansing going on for the vast majority of fights. In duels or skirmishes, as the numbers fighting goes down, the demand of having an intense amount of conditions with survivability or the most extreme case of raw output to literally one-shot an enemy is high. ‘Middle-Man’ zerg-busting builds in Large-Scale combat pale in comparison, and often fail. We get unique roaming builds that absolutely dominate this end of WvW, and even some SPvP builds that have migrated over with similar if not greater stats than before.

In a way, one could make the argument that having conditions excel in small quarters combat while raw sustained damage and tankiness in large scale means that there is a balance going on. When you think about it carefully though, and I mean really think about it…there is no balance. Certain professions (…I might as well say Rangers as the main one) are completely screwed by this meta, and other professions excel at everything. This meta stymies growth, it needs to change.

Continued next Post

Offensive abilities are spammy and out of control in GW2 period.

High condition pressure (trait to remove it, rune to decrease/remove, sigil to remove it, eat food to decrease it, go kittens deep to keep condi at bay! Now you’re another Stepford wife. Happy? Don’t want to do that? Run in a sizable group that does!)

Insane burst damage (Stacked toughness? Too bad, you’re still getting slammed for 8k+)

Immobalize stacking (With all the conditions being sloshed around already, Anet thinks that being a sitting duck is fun)

Torment condition (Really? Design a high mobility combat system ..aaand punish people for moving! Brilliant!) Torment has no place in GW2

All this mixed in with hp/defensive skill cooldown disparities and healing power being a bad joke makes me wonder where it’s all heading to be honest.

Conditions are not just overpowered they’re also idiotic. They put conditions on minor traits that activate randomly. They put conditions on auto attacks.

What kind of strategy is there here? There isn’t any. It’s just spam.

There are more reasons why GW2 isn’t taken seriously as a PVP game and failed horribly at the “e-sport”.

It’s the worst non-sense I’ve ever seen in a game:

A competition where matches are only decided by 2:1 or by PvD, and the real fights do not matter et al.

Here just another illustration of the capabilities of the league-winner (2nd in this case, 48h of fighting are worth less than 4h PvD, great competition)

PS: may sound a bit less constructive, but as all my constructive proposals (at least 3 different ones, none denied 24h availability of WvW) were ignored, it’s time for pure critic. The constructive ones can be looked up in my post-history as soon as the problem is acknowledged as a problem.

For one week turn Friendly Fire on without warning anyone. Tell me that would not be some awesome stuff to see.

I think that would make for some interesting and fun gameplay as well, like back in Shadowbane where AoE’s where used with caution.

But kitten could you imagine the first time a blob tries to bomb another group? Hah.

Kiijj.3594:

Peetee.9406:

Never give up, never surrender
But when the match up is boring, transfer to JQ.

The TW way

ThaOwner.7560:

sorry cant take this post seriously coming from someone in TW

Both of you obviously have never fought with Fannwong in the Oceanic timezone before. Fannwong has been fighting with us during Oceanic/SEA prime time despite TW transferring to JQ for a week back in the days. He is also one of our prime commanders during the SEA/Oceanic timezone and has gone to great lengths to rally the sometimes beleaguered Rallians in a timezone that we are the weakest in.

I would suggest you get to know the man better before you judge him based on the guild that he is in.

I know Fannwong, he’s a good guy. I also know TW’s leader, he’s a kitten.

I obviously don’t hold any ill will towards Fannwong because of the guild he’s in. Unlike Indo who contacts my guild leader and tells him to kick me because he doesn’t like me.

CrimsonNeonite.1048:

Seriously, I kinda expected this.
Well done to Anet for Duping people into spending gems to stack on servers, and getting people to put in all that effort to win that season “reward”.

Once bitten, twice shy?

Oh right how they “duped” people into transferring…

…Nope thats just your tinfoil hat. ANet devs said FLAT OUT that you shouldnt transfer and bandwagon to the top servers for this.

Now that rewards are out to anyone who transferred because of leagues was it worth it?
Because I find the whole situation funny.

Unfortunately the thread creator is right. This is the thing that made my playing in WvW horrible experience and I went out of WvW for a long time. I have to admit that after some time I went back to it, but I really hope they will find solution for this problem, because it pains many, many players.