Guild Wars 2

Xillllix.3485:

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Tempest hard counters DH. You should be able to kill any power-based DH build 1v1. Regardless, if you focus them in a team fight, the die even faster. DH has high burst but honestly no sustain. The reason why condi revs are more feared now is that

- Nothing really saves you from condi aids
- They have a lot more mobility and sustain than DH

The problem is that because bunker tempest can survive a DH stack of traps because of this the elementalist class has been cornered into only 1 viable build. It kittening sucks that every other build we run we just get 1-shot as soon as we step on the trap.

Then there is the issues of perma-cc and class stacking.

I agree that traps should have their damaged lowered. Still debating internally about invisibility.

Aeroxe.8140:

Good start. Would like to see something done to precog if possible, but these are not too overwhelming or underwhelming. Even with these changes, these will not stop teams from running 2-3 bunker mesmers (+tempest) and 2 condi revs.

Well of precog to disallow capping is what I vote for.

You never want to balance mid-season unless it’s a game-breaking thing. So we will have to reserve our opinions until the post-season patch. I think the best way to handle it in the future is breaking down builds into a categorization system, then building a pre-game mode in ranked where you can ban builds. This puts the power in the users to dictate what’s an “unfair” build during the season while we wait for the next patch.

DH is probably mid-tier with the current meta. If you are losing to DH, you aren’t playing the right classes to counter them.

I usually switch to Tempest when I see two at least DHs. You can 1v1 against them due to your sustain (and kill them eventually) and your existence in team fights and provision of protection and frost armor mitigates their power burst by a ton.

Suggestions:

- Make diamond skin ignore protection. Then you should focus more on power for the first 10%.
- Make diamond skin only negate damaging conditions. Movement impediments still apply.

The main issue with DS I feel is not the fact that you can’t do condi damage, but the fact that you can’t slow the lolzy ele down to set up for anything. And they can run in circles4dayz

Tempest hard counters DH. You should be able to kill any power-based DH build 1v1. Regardless, if you focus them in a team fight, the die even faster. DH has high burst but honestly no sustain. The reason why condi revs are more feared now is that

- Nothing really saves you from condi aids
- They have a lot more mobility and sustain than DH

I don’t think the small theif builds that work in the meta actually use shadow refuge so whoever said that is an idiot

I think it should show both—-well, account name and most recently played character.

########esportsboyz

Well of Precog should prevent decap for any ally + themself in it. It should also just pulse instead of acting like a Guardian consecratration.

Acandis.3250:

If I was PvP game director, I probably would know how to conjugate.

lmao /15char

Teleport anywhere granting regen and protection in surrounding area

It’s hard to play any class that blinks due to lag. Always takes 1-2s before my location updates. kitten Wars 2

D/P Thief /15char

Sounds like Anet can make things a bit more simpler for you. cough

1) no idea

2) I would deposit all of your crafting stuff and save it for when you find an item you actually want to craft. You can earn exotic items easier by just dungeoning / pve stuff.

3) You can just unlock more skills or save them up for crafting items. There are many skins that require items you can only purchase with skill points.

4) Spend them all, you can reset anytime for free.

5) You copy and paste those codes into your chat and it should give you a clickable link in-game that shows you where it is on the map.

Here’s a suggestion, if it ain’t broke—-don’t fix it. Fix what’s actually broken like server lag and in-game bugs.

Skyhammer is mad confusing. They should remove it.

Simply pushing far and not pushing far equate to the same thing—it may or may not work.

You can blame the one who pushes far, but it’s also everyone else’s fault for not realizing that in a 3 v 4, you have to play more cautiously until another teammate comes to help. Ideally, you hold off the 3 v 4 until home is captured and the guy moves home or the guy at far wins the fight. If you know you cannot hold out, go far instead.

I don’t care if someone pushes far, but I care when someone is sitting around doing nothing when there are 5 enemies on the map.

Most skill comes from map awareness. After that, it comes to boon/trait/stunbreak awareness. Skill usage requires some skill, but most of them are spammable so yeah.

Join him pushing far or play more defensively mid until your home person can help you. You can’t control players, but you can try to accommodate.

Still avoiding soloq because of this garbage map

i fear soloq because of skyhammer

Obviously, low population will affect queue times unless Anet has a really bad algorithm in matchmaking people.

To improve queue times, I think having a premade of 5 would get you faster matches than always needed to match a team of 5 before matching with another team of 5. So try getting a pug together.

This isn’t an issue. The idea is of the skill is that your first skill throws the enemy off and allows you to do a critical blow.

In real life, if you land a surprising flanking strike a person, they’ll probably be vulnerable for an additional attack. If your enemy anticipates your surprise attack and blocks it, you definitely won’t have a chance at another hit.

The only scenario where sword 3 now fails is when someone is blocking and you hit them. However you can still land it if you hit them before they block or proc aegis so the unblockable perk still works but it’s just not as abused.

Thieves are not meant to be full on tank strikers and spam 3 whenever they feel like it. They are meant to be tricky and strike the opponent at vital times.

Shadowstep on a guardian?? +1 for mobility.

Remove skyhammer from soloq. That’s all we need. We can still keep it in hotjoin in rotation. This will never be a competitive map.

It’s very hard if your teammates are overall really that bad AND refuse to listen/communicate. But here are somethings I try on my own that tends to help:

- Always fight with the team and let the 5th guy take care of home whereever else. If you are confident you are better player, helping and winning the teamfight will be a lot more impactful than doing the solo points
- React to lost fights quicker than everyone in the fight. If you can always peel off in time and sneakily move to a far point or back home to regroup, it’ll mitigate your losses at least
- Communicate often. Sometimes people won’t type anything but they’ll still read what you type.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_psychology

You should make him appear randomly in a fractal shard for lols.

If you destroy it before it before completing the svanir event, then you won’t get credit for it. Can you disable it from being destroyed until after the event is over?

should make a kickstarter for this thread

Since you bring portal, you can choose your fights. AI builds take awhile to burst down so quickly determine if you can win the fight before you actually fully commit to it. If the engi/mesmer got a good cleave on you to start, just drop a portal and leave. Then help your teammates elsewhere. By helping your teammates, you will secure their fight and then easily roll into any other point and overrun the enemy. You can then port 1 of them with you back to home to recover it or rotate towards their home. Then pick off them as they try to recover the points.

If you are fighting this at home, that means they have a 1-3-1 split vs your 1-4 split. Your team should win mid and/or have the upperhand. If you join, ideally you’ll wreck the mid fight faster which allows more team members to peel off and help recover other points faster. If you are fighting this at far…you shouldn’t be pushing far against a strong 1v1 build.

AI builds are bad against any type of team pressure. That’s why you don’t see them run into team fights that often. Just test the waters first if you run into a 1v1 with a AI build, and if you got a good burst on them then continue, but if you miss all your bursts or their build seems super tanky of which you cannot burst down—just disengage and come back later using your portal (or push their home which may have a weaker 1v1 build).

You’ll find that often times, what gives you win in spvp is not always winning your 1v1s but knowing what’s the optimal place for you to be to advance your points. That could either be at home fighting a 1v1 to prevent a point to be captured, or helping a team fight destroy the opposing enemies faster so you can overrun their other players constantly.

If you go the assist team fight route (given the enemy team is split 1-3-1), you can get 5 pts per kill + guarnteed point capture + team help in home by the time the enemy can get 10 pt tics on the home point (it takes 10 ticks to get a capture pt iirc then 1pt per second). If you have two people who are good, killing 1 guy should be easymode, then you get 5 pts and then a point capture with two points capped at the end of this. If the enemy team is a pug as most are, they probably won’t regroup—so you just keep outnumbering them and winning.

Go spirit weapons,

6/6/0/0/2

GS + Scepter/Shield
Zerk Amulet

Heal: Shelter or Signet depending if you want condi clear
Spirit Sword, Spirit Hammer, + your choice here (I switch between SYG/Purging Flame/Bow Spirit)
Elite: Renewed Focus or Tome of Wrath for lolss

It’s a good 1v1 build (high burst) if you can apply the small amount of micro management you need for spirit weapons, it does ok in team fights as long as you don’t fight on aoe circles. I’ve played it about 20 times in top 100 soloq and do fine pushing far or holding home…ocassionally joining in team fights.

bring your reflects #pvestrats

Also, give engineers better melee options other than toolkit and rifle #5

Engi or Ele. They have access to various elements which profit from celestial more.

When trait rng stuff is active, it should show like the other trait buffs (Strength in Numbers, etc.) like “XII” in the buff bar.

Replay videos pls.

manveruppd.7601:

Speed up the pace of engagements? Weird you should say that, I and a lot of people actually think the speed of the combat should go WAY down instead to be followable! Autoattack damage needs to be drastically decreased, and the casting times of other abilities (except stunbreaks obviously) needs to go up, as well as their casting animations made more visually distinct, so that they are easily telegraphed, both to players and to audiences, allowing for meaningful dodges, interrupts, and other clutch moves.

Damage should be better balanced too. I have no problem with zerker thieves being able to burst someone down from 100-0 on their own, but it should have a significant cost to them, forcing them to blow all their cooldowns. Currently initiative regenerates so quickly that if it didn’t work the first time htey’re able to come back and try it again 5" later! That’s way too soon for their target to have gotten back any of their defensive cooldowns, and way too soon for a teammate to have come to help.

CC also needs to be reduced. It shouldn’t be possible for a single player to chain-CC someone until they have completely burst them down. If 2 people team up and alternate their CC, that’s fine, but if a single character has that amount of CC, their damage should also be appropriately low.

Slowing down the fight may make it easier to see what’s going on but you still have a group of 10 people fighting constantly. What makes a host want to view one fight over the other and how long should they spend time viewing it? Slower fights may be boring too and may be too forgiving. If you mean slow down the skill usage but speeding up the fight, I definitely support that. I don’t want spammable fast attacks or slow drawn out fights, I want well-timed attacks that can make or break a fight.

Engagement speed <> skill usage speed.

Drawn out fights are good if there is a combo system or there is no self-healing, but gw2 doesn’t have either.

abcdefghijklmno

Hm…being an optimist and assuming your post is honest—-

(main hand/off hand)

2/6/0/0/6 is your typical D/P spec which is the one of the more common specs. I do not know the S/D one so you may need to look that up or someone will provide below.
P/D is generally not good for competitive tpvp but I’ve seen it work a few times.

As long as you have the stealth buff and not the revealed debuff, you can assume that you are invisible and cannot be seen. You can still take AOE dmg though and/or dmg from channeled skills that have been casted on you before you stealthed.

If you go D/P, backstab is your main dmg source and then auto attack. The semi-full desc below:

D/P + Shortbow
Sigil of Air/Fire on both (you can change these, but this is decent to start with)
Rune of Strength or Rune of the Ogre or Rune of the Pirate
Zerk Amulet
hide in shadows / shadowstep / signet of infiltration / shadow refuge / basilisk

Basic tactic:
Cloak via Pistol 5 + Dagger 2 => Backstab => Blind Field with Pistol 5 near enemy => Auto attack spam => Dagger 2 before blind field ends => Repeat

Situational:
- Use shadowstep only when you are in a major jam or need that condi cleanse before you die. Learn all the blink spots because that’ll help you in the long run.
- Use steal for interrupting heal skills and/or significant boon strips. Don’t just spam it.
- Save shadow refuge for teammates, best anti-stomp skill.
- Use shortbow for traveling, poison fields on downed bodies, cluster bombs for great aoe cleave, and shortbow 3 for evasion spam.

Edit: You can get revealed debuff if you hit an enemy while in stealth or when you leave shadow refuge’s circle before it finishes. Also, heartseeker is best used below 50% or not at all. Autoattacks and backstab do much more dmg and requires barely any initiative which you can reserve for blind fields or shortbow escape/clusterbombs

I think the issue with spectating GW2 matches comes from the game type + combat pace + team size.

I think it’s a popular opinion that capture points is not that fun to watch. It’s actually distracting to the actual combat because it’s giving the viewers the idea that fighting doesn’t really matter that much. If it’s your first time watching GW2 matches—after the first few engagements, it’s not hard to think “Oh, well, they just need to bunker up, zerg, and #lolrunaroundinacircle to win.” Although that is slightly true, that shouldn’t be the impression that GW2 matches should give. If you compare a GW2 stream hosted by someone watching vs a GW2 stream hosted by someone playing, IMHO the difference is crazy. It’s a lot more interesting hearing the players thoughts and picking up the small details on decisions that they choose to make in all the situations. In addition to that, the way they fight and handle different match-ups is also very enjoyable. Currently, viewers and hosts at the moment cannot capture even a small amount of that good detail at all and that’s an issue! (And it’s not the hosts problem—-you need to be a pro auction house announcer with the eyes of an eagle to capture 10 people making all these decisions and plays).

When it comes to the pace of the fight, that is also an issue. For MOBAs, you know that the result of an engagement is going to be quick and/or fairly quick so you will not see the host loiter around aimlessly until the fight ends. They can move along quickly to the next engagement or what others are doing shortly after an engagement occurs. For GW2, fights are more variable—they could be drawn out for ages or they can end quick even in high level play—you cannot tell. This causes issues because if you have two fights going on. The host could talk about one fight, but then miss another fight that just ended or they think this one fight is going to take awhile and they switch screens, and then that fight ends immediately after the host switches camera views. If you want a team game to work well, you need to balance the pace where viewers and hosts can easily capture all of what’s going on. This cannot be helped due to the team size and game type though.

Now for team size; with the all the people to keep up with in a team fight, it’s hard to capture skillful plays that’s changing the tide of the battle. Literally, the viewers just see “Oh, he’s down. Oh he’s dead. Oh, they wiped. Oh they got the point. Oh, they got a team res. Oh, there’s a fight going on at home. Oh they got a stomp.” It’s hard to see/capture the strategies and skill level if you do not go in-depth about a player and change cameras rapidly to try to view all the action.

Again, MOBAs do better at 5v5s because their game-type is well-designed for 5v5s. It’s suspenseful when it comes to pre-engagements and quick and exciting when it comes to engagements. GW2 has a great combat system, but the game mode, team sizes, and pace take away from that.

The only way to fix this with the current game mode IMO is to speed up the pace of engagements so viewers can capture burst strategies as opposed to bunker strategies. Either that or put much more well-designed secondary objectives to limit the team fight sizes and zerging/snowballing. Either that or decrease the team sizes. 2v2s, 3v3s are much better to spectate and host than 4v4s and 5v5s. With smaller team sizes, you can capture the details of skill usage/decision making better and then teach the audience members how the game works in better detail.

A new game mode could solve all of these problems if done well.

Also another thing to look out for when you do knockbacks—there will be random issues where your enemy (when pushed/pulled/launched) will “rubber band” due to server lag and/or some bad code. That’s probably the most annoying for me. “Rubber banding” makes the opponent look like they got hit somewhere, but they auto-relocate elsewhere. #randomhallucinations #thisisreal

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Quincy.2198:

Lopez.7369:

The leaderboard still shows skill because, as Vince mentioned, everyone has to deal with outnumbered matches. So those matches — and other problematic matches — become a statistical wash for everyone after 30 or so games. What leaderboards measure, then, is who can carry their team despite whatever problems — four-on-five matches, bad comps, bad attitudes — arise.

In your opinion, how does it show skill? I’ve seen alot new players in top 25, had them on my team, they didn’t know what they were doing at all. Just lucky because they get matched up with good players.

Keyword is 30 (or insert another arbitrary number)—you cannot have a a lucky streak for that many games. LB doesn’t reflect new players well, but it should reflect veteran players fairly well. Just wait til LB decay gets rid of the newbies and/or they play and get crushed.

TeamQ yes, SoloQ no.

Why not soloq? So a person having 60% winrate with more than 500 games played is not a “fairly well” indication of how well they play?

Most of the time if you win either is dependant on your setup and/or your teammates. You can make a difference, but for me it feels more like a lottery tbh.

To add: Everybody can play a class “well” in this game. Problem is good awareness of rotation, which even top soloq players (those, which never played in teams) bring rarely on the table.

Ah, I see what you mean now. Good point!

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Quincy.2198:

Lopez.7369:

The leaderboard still shows skill because, as Vince mentioned, everyone has to deal with outnumbered matches. So those matches — and other problematic matches — become a statistical wash for everyone after 30 or so games. What leaderboards measure, then, is who can carry their team despite whatever problems — four-on-five matches, bad comps, bad attitudes — arise.

In your opinion, how does it show skill? I’ve seen alot new players in top 25, had them on my team, they didn’t know what they were doing at all. Just lucky because they get matched up with good players.

Keyword is 30 (or insert another arbitrary number)—you cannot have a a lucky streak for that many games. LB doesn’t reflect new players well, but it should reflect veteran players fairly well. Just wait til LB decay gets rid of the newbies and/or they play and get crushed.

TeamQ yes, SoloQ no.

Why not soloq? So a person having 60% winrate with more than 500 games played is not a “fairly well” indication of how well they play?

Quincy.2198:

Lopez.7369:

The leaderboard still shows skill because, as Vince mentioned, everyone has to deal with outnumbered matches. So those matches — and other problematic matches — become a statistical wash for everyone after 30 or so games. What leaderboards measure, then, is who can carry their team despite whatever problems — four-on-five matches, bad comps, bad attitudes — arise.

In your opinion, how does it show skill? I’ve seen alot new players in top 25, had them on my team, they didn’t know what they were doing at all. Just lucky because they get matched up with good players.

Keyword is 30 (or insert another arbitrary number)—you cannot have a a lucky streak for that many games. LB doesn’t reflect new players well, but it should reflect veteran players fairly well. Just wait til LB decay gets rid of the newbies and/or they play and get crushed.

My top 3 pet peeves:
- Turrets
- Minions
- Spirits

Ragnar.3916:

Prysin.8542:

i love how one of the highest RANKED ranger players say “the build works” and everyone just ignores him and instantly declare the build rubbish even though they arent even close to his rank or experience.

Yeah, rank apparently doesnt matter. If noobs cannot play it, it is rubbish. Not hard to play, just “unviable” and rubbish.

ah…. gotta say them words that made me famous now…

People, it’s a L2P Issue, deal with it. If you fail with LB/GS, it is a user error, not a build error. You simply got out-played.

actually he is just rank ~70 and this in na!
(eu players go to na and they are top 25 in 2 days)

even in eu servers, it’s really easy to go rank 50+ really fast with a bit decent team mates.

in the actual state of the game top 50 means nothing.

at least in eu
the best ranger players (azron, yilvina darnus and niah) don’t run (or was running)
a power ranger build
and every one of them stay/ed top 15 in the eu ladder for a long time and played in good teams called cheese mode, 55hp monks and erotic solitude legends.

all of them played spirit ranger and like every one knows eu > na
i have np with eura but keep you hype a bit low na guys.
power rangers are just food in eu meta gameplay, no matter how good they can play.

When did viable = tournament level play? Viable means it can be competitive. Of course most everyone in the high leagues are gonna run meta, min/max everything, and choose builds that have low risk, high reward. But we are talking about viable here which just means able to play in a queued up match competitively this ranges from (0% -> LB #1).

Can it be played competitively in tpvp? Yes. Are there better builds? Yes.

Also, the stereotype is EU is better than NA, but that’s really general. We both have good players, and it’s up to the tournaments to show who’s currently on top of their game.

SchiTown.7598:

The problem with SD is that fresh air does its job much better. I wouldn’t really call it that viable in spvp.

Unless you yolo run two SD engis with the yolo strat of pushing far to burst the kitten out of their home.

But yeah agreen with Spoon, fresh air ele is better because it has the same single-target burst, with better team support and sustain. The only small advantages SD has is cc because of rifle and small aoe bursts with the additional SD bounce.

a t s e.9614:

Paragon.5479:

All of them are not viable so i don’t know why u are complaining cause they can be easily countered and cause of that they are not viable in top 50 tpvp.I am afraid is l2p issue

Maybe not tpvp but in top 50 solo Q they are viable. 2-3 turrets engineers per match in yolo Q. ( I’m rank 19 ATM)

Its pretty easy to be high ranked with a petting zoo build. Even if you suck the build carries.

Sorry, I need to correct this everytime I see this so it doesn’t get confused all over the place.

GW2 Terms
sPvP = PvP in general
tPvP = Queued Up Ranked PvP
TeamQ/teamq = Team Queue
SoloQ/soloq = Solo Q

Thanks~

If they want this to be an action game, they need to balance it around combat, not secondary objectives.

If they want this to be a tactics game, they need to give teammates the necessary time/interface to manage tactics for said secondary objectives before a match not just a 2min wait time.

If they want both, they need a new game designer.