Guild Wars 2

Natwinter.9234:

Rocking the norn thief cultural look, while at maximum body size.

I’m enjoying the hamfisted approach; more bruiser, less cat burglar!

Is that Crushed Bone with Electro Blue? I like that combination sometimes since Crushed Bone tends to be that perfect off white.

The algorithm is better it’s just that a lot people have stopped playing because they got their wings or they’re sick of ranked so they’re queuing unranked. But the thing is if the people I’m ducking are in unranked (I even had an Illustrious Legend on the other team…and he was an engi) while the new players get put on my team (I have a big plus score in unranked) then it’s even worse.

It used to be really good, but with people flooding it that you’d normally see in ranked it isn’t so much anymore.

A crossover comic with DC or Marvel. It can be worked in during story mode where your character (who isn’t shown in the comic to avoid canonizing a certain race, class, and gender combo which is very important in a game with customization options) is on the way to kill an Elder Dragon but The Punisher snipes him before you get a chance to do so. The Pact is geared and ready to go…but The Punisher’s aim made all their prep unnecessary.

AivenPrimus.9184:

All I can probably say is,
Whoever fiddled with matchmaking system, had no idea what he was doing.

Typical characteristic of GW2 RNG and living up to its reputation,
where RNG favors some, and puts everyone else in the trash…

1. 90% of my won matches are won barely,
2. 90% of lost matches are complete blowouts,
3. Any other match is more or less ’’decent’’.

I had freaking 60%+ winrate in S1 and S2,
and now I am not ALLOWED to even get past 40% winrate,

am I supposed to deal with this kitten?
Who the heck designed that matchmaking?

And NO, it has nothing to do with ’’l2p’’ or whatever,
I am well aware of what the heck I am doing in every match.

To be fair the L2P standards get tighter the higher you go up. For example if you hit Ruby or even Sapphire it’s a given you won’t double cap home at the start or rotate into a 3v1 at mid so L2P once you get the basics down means tuning your mechanical skill, reaction times, and understanding the core concepts of one’s classes.

A shirt with Zojja wearing a shirt that says, “I’m with stupid” with the arrow pointing at Trahearne.

Here I gave warrior a try:

The build honestly felt very forgiving and there were Tempests around for most of the match. If I actually become good at condi ‘zerker I’d have a great alternative DPS character in ranked that isn’t weak to condi and can actually teamfight. It’s been awhile since I used warrior and still need to get the interrupt timings on the right abilities down though popping resistance procs seem easy enough to time.

Ouch, meant Well of Recall, my bad.

The balancing is tough enough and powercreep insane enough with just three utilities. If you have a 4v4 at mid that’s four extra utility skills per side, big instant AoE interrupt, AoE CC, etc., and too many classes can do too much as it is.

Lol, I love how or Mes, you struggled (read failed) to find a good fourth utility for Mesmer.

What’s wrong with Well of Precog? The chill and then the alacrity after effect sounds powerful if timed and placed properly. Any friendly Tempest in the field can charge attunements faster while hostile Tempests would take longer to recharge due to the chill.

Tempest are by far the best healing support in the game

That’s true, but imagine taking Eye of the Storm with Flash Freeze, Lightning Flash, and Aftershock? It would be even better. Too good in fact. Great disengage plus two aurashare utilities, one that casts chill and the other reflecting projectiles. As it is now however you need to make a choice based on the opposing comp: take Aftershock for the reflect or if you don’t notice enough projectile hate in the other comp to justify it take Flash Freeze. With four utility slots one could simply take both with swapping Aftershock out for Feel the Burn.

NO! I don’t type in all caps very often, but when I do I’m serious.

Do you have any idea how overpowered thief and mesmer would become if there were a fourth utility slot? Imagine a thief taking Signet of Agility, Shadowstep, Bandit’s Defense, and Infiltrator’s Signet on top of Impact Strike? Or how about Portal, Blink, Signet of Illusions, and Well of Recall or maybe Well of Precog in place of Blink?

You have no idea the Pandora’s Box that would open if a fourth utility slot were to happen. It would be by far the worst thing to ever happen to Guild Wars 2 as there’s enough ability clutter in the game to keep track of.

“Tempest are by far the best healing support in the game”

Hyperionjr.5870:

Agemnon.4608:

Hyperionjr.5870:

I personally think MMR should be totally random within PIP range. There is no algorithm possible to determine how somebody is going to play their next match. You have one team of loss streaks vs. another team of win streaks. How could anybody see that as fair? Plus one premade completely blows any algorithm attempts out of the water.

Which leads me to this: Why isn’t their a solo queue separate from a teams queue? I can’t see how it would make sense to have a team of premades vs. a team of solo queues. If you ask me, nix the failing “algorithm” and fix what tangible aspect of queuing you can (read: premades).

Caz

If you feel like you’re on the losing end or going to be on the losing end of the range’s MMR then you could team with people you know in your pip range. You could team with higher, but those people are also facing people from higher up in some of their matches ensuring that you’d have them as competition for quite some time. You may stomp some lower, get stomped by higher, but those highers have people above who stomp them in turn.

Let’s say someone is low Ruby. They can face off against people in T2 Sapphire for pips, but go against people in high Ruby to take their pips away.

If I want to spend time looking for a group and hoping they are decent players, then I should play TEAM ranked. If I just want to get off of work and turn on the game and jump right into a SOLO ranked game, then I should be able to do so. The whole “get a team” argument is on deaf ears.

But without a team (3 seems best) you won’t have full control over your comp. You can go warrior (or ranger), elementalist, and revenant and if the solos are also two of that class then one can switch it up.

Hyperionjr.5870:

I personally think MMR should be totally random within PIP range. There is no algorithm possible to determine how somebody is going to play their next match. You have one team of loss streaks vs. another team of win streaks. How could anybody see that as fair? Plus one premade completely blows any algorithm attempts out of the water.

Which leads me to this: Why isn’t their a solo queue separate from a teams queue? I can’t see how it would make sense to have a team of premades vs. a team of solo queues. If you ask me, nix the failing “algorithm” and fix what tangible aspect of queuing you can (read: premades).

Caz

If you feel like you’re on the losing end or going to be on the losing end of the range’s MMR then you could team with people you know in your pip range. You could team with higher, but those people are also facing people from higher up in some of their matches ensuring that you’d have them as competition for quite some time. You may stomp some lower, get stomped by higher, but those highers have people above who stomp them in turn.

Let’s say someone is low Ruby. They can face off against people in T2 Sapphire for pips, but go against people in high Ruby to take their pips away.

+1 for the cute asura!

First problem is it’s usually not the best idea to cap as a thief since they can split 2 far. Happened on my thief so I had to bail knowing I wasn’t a warrior or engi who could hold things.

At 1:02 you can see the druid flash blue so here’s where you want to use 5 then 1 for the daze. Since you’re behind them you’d trigger it instead of the blind. Good target by the way, he was on the periphery and had to be pressured especially since he’s ranged offense plus support. You had enough initiative however to do some serious boonstripping via the 3 chain.

1:14 great job capping far. Most of your team however is going down so it’d be a good time to call out where to hit next for when they respawn. At that point the other team would likely go home to take back what you capped while predicting them swinging around home to reach mid since it’s easy enough to assume someone will try taking your home.

1:35 and here they come. When you saw them should have swung back around back and headed to your home keeping up with your spawning team.

2:31 that’s what I was talking about! Nice job with the poison after that.

3:22 nice handling the druid but sword 3 would have stripped the protection.

martin.1653:

Oh, completely forgot about Lovecraftian theme. Largos seems perfect to plug-in that vibe into game. I like this idea.
Someone go bother the Deep Sea Dragon so it awakens.

As long as they aren’t playable. With sylvari, humans, and norn the quota there has been met, we need something more beastly.

Cynz.9437:

There is a flaw with your suggestion. Sometimes pretty bad players get carried by really good group. There is druid on EU that is outright terrible, most of the time all he does is spamming AA, doesn’t help teammates etc. He is legend now. I saw him getting carried by good teammates he keeps getting because apparently MM decided so.

Long story short, your suggestion doesn’t prevent “less” skilled players from landing in higher divisions and being a dead weight there nor getting farmed at some point.

With more play though they should sink. The game needs to simulate LoL matchmaking complete with division loss since it seems to work.

Yes. Everyone has too much of everything. The four Ele d/d meta is gone but insane powercreep replaced it, especially as far as AoE, conditions, and bunkering go.

Mister Fluffkin.7358:

Just play the game, omg. Either you´re good enough to archive your goals or you´re not, but looking for stuff to bypass the system is just lame. You probably cheat in games as well…

Honestly, if you have no fun with pvp and dislike challenges you should probably better play pve. People with your mentality are exactly those guys who blame their team all day but are the worst among them. :/

Nope, no cheating revenant can phase traversal through thick walls in Forest behind mid node near the stairs…I was surprised it actually worked when I first did it) and druid has a trait where it gains stealth and superspeed upon exiting CA form while thief has sick mobility if you manage your shadowsteps and disengages correctly.

The problem with “just playing” is you’re at risk for getting those same teammates and facing off against those same people. Nothing against those guys since beating the other guy (me unfortunately in that case) is what you’re supposed to do I just want to establish from a logical standpoint if it’s ultimately better to wait longer or queue up. I even had an Exalted Legend on my team earlier. I typically got top two in my games today. Okay, personal score doesn’t mean that much, just means I was in the right place at the right time to tag some kills and occasionally was the one to stay behind to get the cap.

The uploaded image isn’t a game I’m salty about, it was a good semi-close game where we lost despite having an Exalted Legend scrapper and the better comp overall (I was ele while they had none). The point is there are people in Sapphire who are able to overcome those odds and it can really kick my MMR’s butt if I’m not careful.

I’ve been archiving my goals quite nicely but could be better on that front, I can and should do subfolders not just by wins and losses by classes but also by ranked and unranked too. I have a folder dedicated to video footage and I’ll need to transfer some video files to my 3TB external HDD soon.

Sensing I’d get a terrible matchup again nearing T3 I took a break hoping to circumvent that scenario again. Turns out I either didn’t wait long enough or aren’t queue dodging.

If you’re unfavored in a certain pip range then the MM isn’t going to be on your side until the higher MMR players rank out. I thought I did just that but apparently stopping ranked from Tuesday to Friday didn’t help. I mean judging from the results it’s my time soon enough to be on the higher end of the pip range but not quite yet. Then again the weaker players moving up I’m hoping to beat could wind up on my team instead so the intention behind my waiting could backfire so I’d have to wait even longer to carry myself out. Blowouts really aren’t fun and I don’t want to put my MMR on the line until I wind up teamed with base specs who double cap home. I could try teaming with guildies but they aren’t always on. Even if we subtract Lord kill point inflation it’s still a huge score disparity.

Tl;dr: To wait, or not to wait? If I check for mathematical and logical patterns in my win/loss record how can I use that to maximize gains? I thought I was doing just that by logging out for awhile thinking it could have gotten me out of the losers’ file (flagged to lose basically) only to be thrown into an absolute curbstomp afterward.

Asura Elementalist
Human Thief
Charr Warrior
Norn Guardian
Asura Ranger

Today it was horrible in Sapphire. Today I’m actually considering Queue dodges for my and the opponent’s teams. I even waited for much of the week so such players would be securely out of my MMR range at both ends too. Oh well, time to wait…again.

Warrior. Maybe stack stealth and wait it out a bit?

Why do you say it’s “archaic”? You get far superior control with a mouse over keys. Keyboard turning is used as an insult for good reason.

There were a couple of games where I was on a team that absolutely trounced others but still get on teams where we lose ourselves (those tend to be close).

I agree the matchmaker isn’t fair to those who are underskilled relative to division.

Ithilwen.1529:

OK, I’ve ended my night because I’m too fatigued and depressed to continue.

On the heals of 23 straight losses last night, I just came off an 11 match loss streak.
Are you going to tell me that this matchmaking is in any way “fun”, “fair” or “competitive?” REALLY?

You know when Mesmer started doing better than average it was emergency nerfed. Now Warrior is just crushing it. I’ll wager it will be allowed to do so throughout the season.

I think I can identify the problems:

1.That is a lot of games. With 8 hours of work, 8 for sleep, and 8 for play that leaves 8 hours of Guild Wars 2 on school or working days while on days off that leaves 16. Consider resting.

2.You aren’t getting enough deliberate practice. I want you to scrim with a warrior 100 times. Just start a private arena and practice the duel. Not just a metabuild warrior but with many different weapons and utility skills to ensure you know how to read and react to each skill. When your winrate is over 50% against him then I want to see you duel two warriors. You now have to keep track of twice the information and both have heals and long periods of mitigation so good luck!

Actually, before you face off against two meta warriors I want you to watch Lord Helseth defeat two warriors so you can know what’s likely the best way of handling them. Then you’d try emulating what Helseth did.

The lowest health! The lowest armor! A complete lack of base sustain! A list of rotting utilities left like that since launch! The worst elites in the whole game! The lowest dps ( I don’t give a kitten about pve and killing random AI controlled Pokemon)

Because it’s all balanced out by its great versatility and strong zoning and booning potential. Aurashare is very powerful and if you take Mender’s over Cleric’s you’ll have good offensive potential. Fire and air are especially good for making rezzes unsafe for the opponent. Eye of the Storm and Lightning Flash also give Ele good mobility for disengaging or even offensive potential when paired with shocking aura. It’s simply the best class in the game if you can play it well.

Why I can’t use staff in pvp?

You can. It has good AoE CC though gust has a long charge with impractically slow speed. Fire staff is amazing for cleaving rezzers and creating burning combo fields for your teammates to help you stack burning while water has an AoE chill field and two healing skills, a smaller radius burst and a larger radius skill that grants regeneration and cleanses conditions. Earth also has magnetic aura, and on top of aftershock and earth overload is lots of reflects if you need it.

With that said dagger/focus is usually better, but staff still finds its uses between zoning (creating don’t go there areas so the opponent stays away), CC, and general support.

fishball.7204:

gin.7158:

You know what. At this point, I want people to reach high tiers easier so I can get a match without waiting hours. The prestige at this point is garbage anyway.

Mmmm. Even at my paltry diamond rank my queues go up to 12 minutes which are longer than most games go for ;_;

I don’t even get balanced/close matches, most of my games depends on who rolled the scrubbier team and/or bad comp.

Can’t imagine how bad it is in legend for u lol

In Sapphire this morning I had over a six minute queue. In Sapphire that’s simply nuts.

Zenith.7301:

Ubik.8315:

This season in a nutshell.

Please, as if any class stood a chance against thieves, revenants, warriors, and mesmers if they ran ANYTHING but bunker.

Newsflash, Rangers, Necros, Eles, and Engineers CANNOT run a single offensive power build without getting 100% countered and farmed by the 3 above classes.

Thief and mesmer in particular ruin any other berserker or marauder build. They cannot be counterplayed with the amount of evades/defensives they have on top of their burst, while a pitiful ranger sits on a 60 sec cd invuln, a necro has nothing for dodges and all his attacks are easily dodge (just like ranger greatsword and longbow), and Ele running in 12-14k HP gets eaten alive by thief.

Thief has to work hard for their burst and have to manage abilities very carefully. Necros have an extra health bar that can even regenerate quite fast while rangers (I have one so I know) have CA form stealth and superspeed on top of combo field triggering via smokeskelk field and staff 3. That’s not even counting longbow range and vantage points, so the environment itself provides defense in many cases. Thief can’t really fight many 1v1’s and losses against them always feel fair. To appreciate thief you really need to play the class, sometimes burning through that initiative is too tempting. Why don’t you shortbow everywhere? Because you might need that precious initiative for a fight. Sometimes a fight comes your way and you need to be ready, but if you can shortbow 5 across the map with some dash thrown in then of course do so.

meissa.4239:

my asuran thief, alula! at first i wasn’t sure what direction i’d take with her but then the infinity ball personal story happened and i knew what i was going to do… im v happy with it.

That’s really cool, love the environment too.

I gave my thief another makeover with Viper’s boots and coat, don’t remember the pants and goves but the gloves are shadow abyss dyed while the pants are enameled solitude to try simulating jeans. Boots are enameled generation, golden sheen for the metal accents, and gold fusion for the straps. Green is electro lime. I’m going for a cool rocker look.

There’s a practical reason why it isn’t allowed, it would obstruct aura tells. You know to withhold burst on an ele if they have Obsidian Flesh up, but if an aura obstructed it you wouldn’t have that information.

Well not every time a win but we were outclassed. Some of my teammates were near Ruby while I’m in T2 and the other team had Exalted Legends. I have a winrate higher than 50% this season but whenever I lose it’s the matchmaker pulls from a drastically lower pool, dramatic class stacking (no hate against the three guardians I had on my team a couple days ago but c’mon man!) or get outclassed because the MM pulls from way higher pip ranges to the point of playing against those who made Legendary last season. I recognize the engi so I know my team had reasonably similar MMR.

I think a big problem I have on Revenant is I don’t switch from a teamfight mindset (saving abilities to help downed and interrupt rezzing) to a dueling mindset when the situation demands and the dissonance between where I think staff 5 is going and where it actually goes doesn’t help. Still, I’m decent with dueling but could be better.

While sometimes matchmaking is great (better than last season) it can still be terrible. We just got outplayed but still, they had two guys in Ruby while I’m in T2 Sapphire.

I think it should go by MMR but keep divisions roughly similar to Elo percentile:

Amber: lowest 32%
Emerald: 33%-64%
Sapphire: 64%-84%
Ruby:85%-98.5%
Diamond- 98.6%-top 501-1,000 players
Legendary: Top 500

Within Legendary have a Challenger league for the top 200. Their rank would be displayed alongside a reskinned Legendary icon. If someone holds their number 1 spot for a week of active playing they get a special title and the number 1 spot would be a temporary title called number one guy or champion of GW2.

Will Jormag ever get ceramic armor if he’s weak to heat? Ceramic Jormag needs to be made canon since an ice dragon would logically seem to know his own weakness (or is heat too obvious to implement?) and have his minions and their Inquest allies build him such a heatproof armor? It would even be a coherent and convincing reason to justify an armor stripping mechanic (defending catapults from being destroyed so they can throw lava phase 2?)

How common is it for elementalists to be able to use all elements and how easy/hard is it to learn them?
Are there known to be elementalists who can only use one, two or three elements?
How much training would it require to learn them all?

I personally think learning all four is “easy” as far as non-muggle research goes and what elementalists know are the ABC’s of magic while more advanced stuff specializes in a single element. This would be great from a perspective of reconciling story and gameplay:

1.A Pyromancer for example would still know his base elements, but due to his strong attachment to fire can tap into that, but the catch is he loses touch with the other elements. He could switch back to a general Elementalist at will. This would justify convincingly why certain future elite specs (logically after Tempest Ele’s future elites will likely specialize in one element like fire granting greatsword, earth hammer, water shortbow, etc.) replace the other elemental attunements with abilities thematic for that element.

For example, a Pyromancer could have four ability slots like a standard ele, but instead of the four elements you have three Pyromancer bars and bar 1 would be the ele’s fire weapon abilities. The other three attunements would be the same regardless of weapon set equipped. Reveal, burning, might, and power damage would fit the elite spec’s theme just fine.

Andy Warhol.6250:

I think some mini figurines would be nice. Say to scale using inches (or centimeter) measurements. These could include all our favorite characters and monsters, as well as special offers that could include your player characters.

Like a blind bag? I think that’d be cool and main characters in the story could be rares while common mobs like the Mordrem Stalkers could be common.

I was doing great earlier but had a couple of blowout matches in the other teams’ favor. Both matches had the same DH and Scrapper so I might have to wait until they rank up. Given the fatalistic nature of the matchmaker I’ll receive teammates of a similar quality while my opponents remain that good until I can manage to queue into a different pool.

Why is team strength so different depending on when you queue?

Edit: my conditions removed from allies is only 5 in one of the pics, perhaps we lost due to me not using staff 4 enough and that one time staff 5 whiffed when trying to push rezzers? The skill has a mind of its own sometimes -_-

fishball.7204:

All i’m seeing is you telling people to ‘git gud’ when you’re not really that good yourself and saying legitimate complaints about the matchmaking system are part of the whole ‘git gud’.

Me and Cynz have both posted a fair amount of screenshots showing the matchmaking system sucks and we’re both winning and above diamond already this early into the season. It’s really obvious to anyone who looks at the math that the system is flawed and hence our complaints.

Umm, Diamond this early in the season pretty much correlates with Legendary.

Sarrs.4831:

Cynz.9437:

ah idk, maybe members from TCG, 55 etc.

that’s like saying your definition of a car is a datsun 180

cmon

what makes a player good at pvp

What makes a player good at PvP is efficient cooldown management and timing and good reaction times as a foundation with solid game knowledge on top of that.

What about mugs or shirts with finishers or legendaries on them? Like the Dreamer ponies.

Also, a shirt with Taimi on it where the text says, “I’m mature for my age!”

I’m in T2 Sapphire too. I was on a winstreak until I had a team with 3 Guardians in it. Before that I had a match where we had a couple of Emeralds and they were four Sapphire and a Ruby and we still won.

Basically MMR takes into account pip range and win/loss record versus others.

We need to do something about class stacking. Had a match with three DH. I was even being polite asking for a switch and not threaten to AFK because of it. They were doing alright for the most part but were just too limited by their comps.

There are 8,001 possible 5v5 matchups and twice this season I had two matches with three DH’s on my team. It wasn’t a match we should have lost but we just didn’t have the resources to sustain and I spent so much of the match low on health and energy just waiting to recover.

So can you tank your mmr until you the enemy team is full of amber-playstyle players? So when you actually try you can win?

I should hope not. My sense of sportsmanship is utterly offended at such a notion. A player by being on a team has a moral imperative to do what they can to help that team win.

I don’t know. I think it’s pretty kittenty that the system punishes people with lower MMR. Why not just match up similar MMR and see who wins? Isn’t that more skill related than forcing people to go against a team that’s theoretically better?

If a player is bad then their results need to reflect that. Allowing division drops would be a good solution so weak players would have credible chances of winning as they’d be facing each other. People may ask, “Why am I Bronze?” Because you have the technique and game knowledge of a Bronze. “But I did all this great stuff!” You aren’t rated by your best play but by your average play. If I run a race and do a 5:00 minute mile pace for half a mile yet finish at a 6:30 minute mile pace then should I be placed based on if I did my fastest time throughout the race or when I actually crossed the line (i.e., a 6:30 minute mile pace)?

warbignime.4610:

fishball.7204:

In other competitive games, nobody loses 100 games in a row. They might be in bronze/paper leagues but at least they can get some wins here and there. GW2 is the only game that punishes people so heavily and it’s just bad.

Do you honestly believe the guy? had a 100 losing streak?

He’s a brave and persistent bro. Reasonably one would expect they’re due for a win after losing around four or so games and the probabilities of a win should logically go up as you play more, but a huge 100 loss or even 20 loss streak is symptomatic of something systemic.

Booms.3952:

Eater of Peeps.9062:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

It’s not impossible at all. The problem, like in S2, is it’s going to be hugely influenced by your MMR rather than your factual play skill at that moment.

If you have high MMR you could probably metaphorically sleep on your keyboard and win since you will be given players with the best odds of winning while having to fight players who are clear underdogs (the kind of matches you can win even if you have 1 of your teammate dc).

If you are of low MMR the MM will stack the odds so badly against you any pro players would loose too to what they would have to contend with if they were in your shoes.

The mid MMR zone is where you will have easy and hard matches with the consequence of making win streaks possibly very hard to get and keep going.

The most important factor in any game outcome is, and always will be no matter how godly you are, who the MM pair you with and against. Long story short, the MM still handle very poorly soloquing even if it is by far, at least I think it is, the way the huge majority play the game.

This is true. I had a pro ESL player play on my account, with me watching. He played 6 straight games and was only able to win one. There was zero team support because my mmr is so low. No way even a pro can carry a whole newbie/baddie/low mmr team to victory against ppl on teams w/ high mmrs/wins/win streaks. It was proven to me definitively for good by a pro on my own account.

who was it

Since it’s against the rules to have someone else play on your account (especially in competitive PvP) I think that’s a question better left unanswered.

No, I had many streaks to get me out of Emerald, won a few in Sapphire, then bad luck set in so I’m taking a break from ranked since I’m still seeing Exalted Legends in Sapphire. My tightest games this season were 500-499 (but only because I had a disconnect) won and second tightest 500-497 (no disconnect so it was the closest legit game since in the other one they caught up because I wasn’t there doing Revenant stuff) won, and that one had a Primordial Legend on my team!

I remember getting base spec rangers and warriors in T5 Sapphire last season. I had an unreal tilt and would have unfairly blocked them from being teamed (They’d reappear over in my matches). Then on my Tempest I’d go far with a Warrior and we’d deviate from the standard (and predictable) four mid one home strat. I tend to play classes that are weak to condi (even Tempest since it needs to be above certain HP to trigger Diamond Skin) and with Reapers and Chronos running amok the meta didn’t help either. Reasonable excuses are still excuses however and I finally got out of Sapphire, made it to T2 Ruby, and quit while I was ahead for the last two weeks.

This season I’m going to try for at least Diamond. It’s always high noon somewhere in the world ^_^

Sounds like you have some aptitude to have made Sapphire already. The hate comes from how stealth takes information of your position away from the opponent while lots of attacks have dodge on top of the three dodges. Thief isn’t even the cheapest class, Mesmer can stack unreal levels of confusion and torment, have lots of blocks, can hide in the chaos of animations and do moa (Gravity Well is a better skill overall in my opinion due to its shorter cooldown and strong support and zoning potential while moa is better in certain situations), and drop a portal mitigating certain teammates’ low mobility.

Necromancer has a shroud and lots of boon corruption and condi bombing, Tempest isn’t cheap per se but is the best overall class due to its versatility, good support, and decent mobility via active skills for disengage (or even engaging in some cases) such as EotS and Lightning Flash, and Druid can feel cheap. Anything in the game can feel cheap.

The acid test for determining if something is really cheap is to ask ourselves what weaknesses the class has.

Necro- low mobility, focus.
Guardian- low base HP pool, traps gimmicky, low mobility.
Thief- Low base HP, squishy, low teamfight potential
Engineer-Have to think long and hard on this one, but word is boon corrupt and condi.
Ranger-Condition pressure and stunlocking
Revenant-Cooldowns and energy need to be managed at the same time, unreliable self heals.

Sometimes a particular thief could be running something slightly off meta (staff instead of D/P for example) and it counters what you’re playing. You feel like you’re outplaying them, dodging vaults, getting bursts, but their burst options recover before yours so you’re a sitting duck 1v1. They could even shadow refuge (try firing AoE into it since if thief leaves it’s a reveal so he’s committed to that circle) though the skill is rarely taken these days and cap off with the stealth staff attack for the knockdown and just finish you. But that’s just part of the game to use your class’s advantages and engage what you counter.

Then you have to further break it down by build (elite specs are assumed).

That was cool especially how you took out some members of big name teams.

I wished s/d was as useful as d/p but it’s only great for dueling. Nice game play

I’ll try it with Sigil of Rage since it’s a weaponset that really benefits from quickness. I might swap out Fist Flurry for Haste when running it but the skill has a bad reputation. Sw/D has some good utility between the shadowsteps, daze, and 3b boon steals and hit through blocks after Sw/D 3a dodges. However, the set feels somewhat slow and Sw/D 1c feels too committal. With quickness however the AA and skill 3 chains are great.

Loss when playing to win = Take loss for what it was, seek to reach greater heights of self improvement in next match.

That’s normally the case but with MMR at stake a loss carries the risk of weaker teammates and stronger opposition. Know what I saw in the lobby? Exalted and Primordial Legends still in Sapphire and some I even faced off against in unranked today. Okay, I don’t mind losing unranked but how are you supposed to compete against Exalted Legends? At least three of the games in the picture had them (one of them a unranked Primordial Legend in unranked).

The games were close but I know I could have done better at times.

I played this Skyhammer game and here are some notes:

1.It’s strongly player vs. camera obstructions so can’t really see much.

2.Still not used to detargetting to get better control of my character.

3.Using skills more than intended since it counts more than the last button press.

4.Wasting too many dodges.

5.+1’d far too late and had to disengage since Scrapper is a horrible matchup for Daredevil.

Build is the metabattle build with Eagle Runes and Fist Flurry. I got in lots of interrupts and was sure to use poison but maybe too much since it left me low on initiative.

+ Only died once

+ Interrupted key skills

+ Knew when to disengage

+ Doesn’t have auto attack enabled so stow weapon simply happens by not pressing the button

+ Knew when to stop hitting the revenants when they had their shield up

- Wasted too many dodges

- Not looking at minimap often enough

- Fist Flurry too underutilized. I should consider swapping it out. I just didn’t have a safe and efficient opening for it

- Most conflicts simply weren’t favorable for thief

- Didn’t use Impact Strike when I should at times

-Didn’t use the Shadowstep return when I should have

- Skyhammer, but we all shared that handicap.

- Need to detarget

- Need to stow weapon for the D/P 3 but it’s too unintuitive.

How long until I get my thief legs back?

Overload Air at start so you can put some swiftness on your team.

Another ele did that and I sometimes do but considering how I like to camp I should probably do so anyway to take into account how I probably aren’t going to open with it. If I overload they’ll have information and overloads take a while to charge so I could get dazed out of it or my attunement stability exhausted. If I’m too inefficient that runs the risk of getting exploited.

You’re an ele, the tankiest member of your team, yet you’re trying to play chicken at mid at the start. Just jump on that point, and start contesting it.

I’m running Mender’s which is squishier than Cleric’s. I have enough active defensive such as EotS and Ligthning Flash (mobility) and Obsidian Flesh (mitigation) though these are on long cooldowns. I had some matches before where I’d get focused then I’d have to disengage and return to the node.

at about 0:55 you see someone leave mid and go towards quarry. You should have followed them. Alternatively, you should have gone far for a cap.

Looking back I should have. Just didn’t want to leave mid hanging but realistically the opposing team would’ve lost the node anyway.

randomly used water overload, when you had 2 eles, and the last guy was full health.

Wanted to aurashare and ensure everyone around got healed up and cleansed. The cooldown is decently short.

you waste a lot of time trying to sit on point, when the other ele is already on point. Go train that necro.

Yeah that’s a bad habit. I’m afraid of overcommitting since it’s a traditional weakness. I was also waiting for people to go to another point where my presence wouldn’t lead to an over rotate. You don’t need four guys to beat two. But in general I agree it’s something I need to work on.

You’re also randomly spamming lots of dodges for no reason at about 3:10

I’m traited to cleanse chill and burning upon dodge. Whether it’s Druid or Tempest chill screws me over sometimes as critical skills have 0.x time left.

4:30 not sure why you’re trying to doublecap here.

I was wondering the same thing at the moment lol! Maybe because I thought the warrior was nearby. So I ran back towards mid then saw on the map the Necro getting downed.

I call out targets regularly. The chat is too fuzzy to read given that Youtube tends to have bitrate loss so I’ll upload a screenshot.

I’m used to be under heavy pressure so I played in a way that stemmed from that habit instead of a more regular pace. There’s a certain mindset for when you have advantage and when you’re at a disadvantage. Sometimes I’ll ask how would a pro-leaguer react to my play to try avoid getting steamrolled, but the question in hindsight is silly since if I definitively knew I’d be Legendary already. Can’t imagine a scenario with the optimal reaction if we don’t have the skill or game knowledge to know what it is. There are lots of potential matchups at different parts of different maps with their kiting obstructions, vantage points, escape shortcuts, 1v1’s, 5v5’s, 4v3’s, etc., so there are a lot of factors to take into account.

There’s also the conundrum of be proactive and force reactions, or try being an optimal reactionary myself. If you use a move it’s on cooldown, but they can be reacted to by being mitigated and dodged, which would leave me at a slight or even major disadvantage depending on how important and committal the move is. If it does hit however the onus is on me to keep up the pressure, but subsequent pressure can be blocked or mitigated. This isn’t Street Fighter where I can use hit stun to string combos but rather opponents can keep on trucking unless hit with a CC, and even then stability mitigates that. I’ve noticed that the more passive mitigation (toughness and vitality) someone has the more aggressive they can afford to be. Imagine fighting a champion in PvE, they have loads of HP and a breakbar whereas you the player only need one CC ability and can be two shotted. He has all the leeway in the world to be aggressive whereas the player needs to exploit certain windows for their aggression and not overreach since overreaching tends to get punished. That’s the other thing I’m afraid of, overreaching. I do overly aggressive stuff and get punished for it. I’m trying to find the balance.

Thanks all for the advices.

Edit: While not intentional I noticed another mechanical mistake! Needlessly wasting Obsidian Flesh on that 3v2 stomp when he was securely cleaved down enough where even if I’m interrupted he’ll get finished off anyway.