Guild Wars 2

Additionally, “OP” in this game means “Decent if you’re relatively skilled”.

Incidentally, “meta” essentially means “builds that have been proven to play well at the highest level”. Rather than “the only good build” as people tend to take it to mean.

Balance is actually pretty tight, in my opinion.

BurrTheKing.8571:

Really sad to see everything be “Cele or bust” though.

Wut?

Bunch of Rabid builds being thrown about for killing Engi as well as Celestial “shoutbow”, which incidentally works well with Rabid as well.

Point being made is, Engi is weak to Condi/CC in terms of the “meta”.

If you want to kill an Engineer as a Warrior 1v1 100% of the time, assuming sufficient mechanical skill run:

Strength (III) + (VII)
Defense (V) + (IX)

—spend the other points where you like, recommend Discipline for adrenaline.

Use Mace/Sword and Longbow.

—Utility as you please, consider more CC = more confusion.

Rabid Amulet with at least one Doom Sigil for additional condi pressure.

This build is god-like vs Engineer.

In fact, the only combo you probably can’t 1v2 is Mesmer/Thief…

lol

You should try a mace condi Warrior build OP.

Or press 2 Ranger.

Easy as kitten, might get a few 1v1 wins and even sneak in that PvP daily!!

> Play Warrior
> 4, 0, 4, 0, 6.
> Mace/Sword + Bow
> Rabid Amulet, Orr Runes, Sigil of Doom.

Win every 1v1, unless special needs tier uncoordinated.

GG

It was.

In the past it was very weak and no-one used it.

They tweaked it.

Now it is viable and some people use it.

Definitely not everyone, because it doesn’t work with a lot of builds.

Try running it and see if it makes you as OP as you imagine.

Pro-tip: It won’t.

Good luck out there.

Have all the people here complaining about connection issues being on ANet’s end made much effort to troubleshoot their problem?

I live 4 hours from the nearest city, in remote Australia, a country renown for it’s kittenty decaying copper network, and in all my time playing since launch I have not had a single disconnect that was the fault of ANet’s servers.

Well this is new.

How exactly does something which everyone has access to, which simultaneously improves depth and diversity of gameplay, make one more powerful than another?

Which are these OP classes?

Build doesn’t matter?

Are they builds which are specifically strong vs whatever you play?

How did this “no counterplay” argument become so popular? It’s as nonsensical and blatantly incorrect as the “human eye can’t see 60 fps” argument in console gaming.

Is this simply an excuse to deny the possibility that another player is better, as with 95% of these type posts?

I very much disagree with your opinion here MrBig, I also thought you weren’t very nice in that movie.

Nevertheless, I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors, just not this one in particular.

Funny how Turrets have been considered useless for years, yet now they start getting played with no major changes from their original form besides some bug fixes and suddenly, every forumite desperate to blame a loss on anything but themselves is crying “nerf”.

Same story every time.

Honest to god, my strat for killing Turret Engineers has always been to run in and just kill the useless kitten because Turrets are slow firing, low dps, dumb as kitten AI.

I play a tankier build though, seems logical that turrets would shred the typical all-or-nothing burst build 1v1.
That’s kind of the point, though.

At some point, strategy has got to become a factor in your positioning about the map, in my opinion. If you’re sure the AI will kill you and you can’t fight from beyond 700 range, take a burst friend with you and kill the Engineer in <2 seconds with a combo because there is nothing they can do to prevent that.

Ranger is really potent, but most Rangers are utterly useless, so it balances out.

I don’t get why these forums assume turret Engi is so potent.

I must be missing something because I’ve never encountered a Turret Engi worth mentioning in tPvP.

I get QQ for being turret from the rare forumite who actually PvPs between rage posts though, despite having always played 3-kit.

My opinion is that it’s all about blaming something other than oneself for a loss.

Sounds cool.

I would also love a viable version of the Charrzooka!

Certainly fun options to look at if they planning new Elites.

Personally, I prefer Torment as with Xyonon.

You’ll reduce max theoretical damage, but in practice it’s another condition to be cleansed, which is a very significant real world DPS improvement.

Additionally, the psychological effect of a large array of conditions on most opponents should not be underestimated.

(Of course, this is all opinion, unconfirmed by any empirical evidence).

Perhaps it does need to be looked at for channeled, skills. The Flame Thrower’s “Flame Jet” auto in particular, since it hits so very fast. But a 90% nerf is without question going too far.

Retaliation is designed specifically to discourage this kind of AoE spamming stuff. Knowing when to attack and when to hold off is part of the skill factor and subsequent appeal of GW2 gameplay. Reducing Retaliation damage, or adding an internal cooldown would, in my opinion, diminish the boon’s efficacy in providing this intended effect on gameplay.

I think the best way to reasonably attempt solving this particular issue would be to somewhat reduce the hit rate of Flame Jet, whilst adjusting the damage of the auto relatively.

I’ve always found Ranger extremely powerful.

Unfortunately the class, in my opinion, is so incredibly easy that it is boring to play.
Fun to dive in for one or two games every now and then, watching as the character completely dominates the battlefield, but laughing at my cat pawing my keyboard is fleeting entertainment at best.

Character dialogue was great, the size and bustle going on in the SilverWastes camp was excellent, the voice acting was exceptional and the lore influenced story was a pleasure to play and read through.

Well done, very well done.

Playing from a rural farm in Australia, I’ve found the networking for this game to be exceptional. I have a small delay as is par of course for someone in my geographical location, but see very little of the typical negative side affects of this.

I would suggest you perhaps first consider the possibility that the issue is on your end or somewhere on the way from you to ANet, not ANet’s servers themselves.

ANet support may be able to help you diagnose the issue, if you open up a ticket with them.

Additionally, if you live a long distance from the servers, maybe give a Tunneling service a trial. Pingzapper is my personal favourite and they do a free unlimited trial, but there are plenty of others if you put out a google search.

Good luck

Hmm, definitely a modest dose of “get gud” required here.

I’ve recently enjoyed a little QQ from the rare forum goose who actually participates in PvP between rants. I play 3 kit, but still received the old “Turrets are OP, you suck, /block”.

So, I’d just like to mention as a par of course that in some cases, your opponent simply played better than you.

AND secondly, perhaps much more importantly: Please play whatever class/build you think is OP BEFORE coming to the forums to have a whinge. Sadly, the OPs in most of these type threads never follows this reasonable advice.

P.S. Arbitrary elitist “I have no trouble with AI pets, lrn 2 AoE” type sign-off.

I think Sinister stats would be best for PvE if you’re after the ultimate balance between condi and power, right? I run celestial for all modes though.

I’m more a PvP player than PvE, where survivability matters much more, but Celestial works fine in PvE. Especially some of the new open world stuff where being able to juggle lots of mobs at once is quite handy.
Just don’t expect the epic dps of a “meta” full ’zerker build.

Decap/push engi is one of the weakest Engineer builds for 1v1. It’s entirely a skyham/team build.

Stability will hardcounter a decap. Otherwise it still doesn’t beat anything, it just lasts longer.

As always though, skill > build. A player with solid mechanics will still wreck nubs regardless of build focus.

Everyone knew way ahead of time.

There was a huge amount of noob QQ.

It’s a great change.

g8 b8 m8

/15 Charrs

As an Engi main:

Excellent change to a legitimately OP skill.

All immunity skills should see a relative change in my opinion.

Once that is done and immob stacking gets removed I won’t have any big balance complaints.

Sounds like an exciting, memorable shift in the fight. Should have been more careful there, but at least you had an unforgettable experience.

/zip

Guys, just stop.

Downed state is absolutely excellent and creates great gameplay moments and opportunities.

Enough minority qq, go discuss something legit.

/lock

Yep, getting rebalanced to 50% duration reduction at 33% health, a very solid change. Hopefully other immunity skills see relative balance changes in the near future.

Koi Cake is perfect for condi builds, especially if you are aiming for confusion stacks.

I reckon the Candied Dragon Roll (lifesteal on crit) is better for your power build assuming you have precision.

The -Condi Duration stuff is probably next best for PvP, probably best for zerg stuff in particular because survival > everything else.

Bombs for area denial or shield 5 for the stun when they attack out of stealth.

Thieves will have an easy time getting away though, pretty hard to actually get the kill unless they really kitten up, but you’re really hard to kill for them also. Shmeh

Bobbleheads are so cute, I’m loving it

The posts for a few people scrambling to figure out how to turn them off make it even better! :P

Very well done ANet

Yunalesca.9850:

If my opponent applies confusion, I also have to act:
Option 1: stop attacking. Sure, I wont kill my opponent within the next seconds, but I wont loose that much life and after the confusion expired, I can attack again.

As a Engineer that plays a confusion stacking spec already, I can say with absolute surety that I won’t just stop attacking because my opponent has. He stops attacking because and I wreck him with everything else I have.

With Perplexity runes, confusion will be lasting 8 seconds even on ability casts, that is a really long time to not be attacking if you can’t afford to cleanse.

You will lose much life.

Yunalesca.9850:

Option 2: use cleanse. I get rid of the confusion (maybe, depends on the class and cleanse you play and use…)

Absolutely, but now everyone must stack vast amounts of cleanse to be sure they’ll be able to remove all buffer conditions as well as the confusion. If this takes multiple casts, you’ve just taken 3000-4500+ damage, half health for some, applicable every 15 kittening seconds.

Many seem to be mistaking this thread as an discussion that confusion itself is too strong and arguing to that end, rather it is an discussion pointing out that Perplexity runes themselves make confusion too strong through being too easy to stack at too greater duration.

As a confusion Engi main, I stand to gain from this addition significantly.

But I’m worried this will strong arm anyone who doesn’t want to run Perplexity Confusion builds or Bunker cleanse builds out of PvP and off to other games, because no-one wants to get wrecked constantly by such obviously cheesy runes.

There are no incoming runes which buff crit burst by 40%, because it’s already powerful.

There are no incoming runes which buff passive regen by vast amounts, because it’s already powerful.

Why then add runes which buff confusion to such an incredible degree? Because it’s already powerful enough.

My suggestion would be to nerf Perplexity down to be on par with other runesets because WvW still has to deal with this bullkitten. How about:

(1) +25 Condi Dam
(2) +10% Condi Duration
(3) +50 Condi Dam
(4) % Chance to strip boon on hit (Cooldown: x seconds)
(5) +100 Condi Dam
(6) 5 Stacks of Confusion on interrupt for 5 seconds (Cooldown: 25 seconds)

That’s still a powerful runeset that I’d use and is possible to base an entire build around.

More realistically, improve NPC “AI” to repair defend etc.

Perhaps scale AI with player count, less players on your server, your server has more powerful NPCs.

Players are still more powerful, but the issue is slightly alleviated. Could be pretty good.

It’s a complex issue, but kittening with non-NA players isn’t cool.

Thedenofsin.7340:

There are so few players left that I often can’t find a 5v5 game with enough players in it.

Really?

Just finished a tPvP session, been playing for ~3 or so hours. Queue times seemed fairly good.

Although, with PvP rewards essentially turned off at the moment there’s probably less people playing than usual.

• How thoroughly thought through was the decision to add Perplexity runes to structured Player versus Player given the months of complaints by the community and videos showcasing the issue having seemingly been ignored beyond the extremely minor nerf to the ridiculously powerful runeset?

• Any updates to borked non-human armours (especially Charr tail woes) incoming with the feature pack?

• Any updates on improving relevance of Condition damage in Player versus Environment?

• Maps/Modes in structured Player versus Player progress?

Yunalesca.9850:

they can always stop shooting.

> Stop shooting

Love how people say this in seriousness as if it isn’t an issue.

“Yeah bro, just stop using any abilities and run away for 15 seconds man, you’ll be OK for sure, EZmode.”

Ridiculous.

It’s perplexing that months of video and legitimate complaints on the WvW forums have amounted to this.

I’m gonna be trolling so hard with these runes, if they are intent on kittening sPvP in the kitten rather than just releasing new modes to revitalize it, may as well go down laughing. What a shambles.

Bombs can take a while to get used to. You have to lead, CC or be chased by the enemy.

The area denial offered by Bombs can be very effective for gaining a breather from bursty melee professions, especially full ’zerk burst thieves.

People have been posting complaints/suggestions about FT since launch, most “veterans” are probably past caring by now.

The fact is, outside of PvP, everything is viable, so it really doesn’t matter too much. Just play whatever feels the most fun. FT’s big benefit is it does feel kitten fun!

It’s not even that FT is totally unusable in PvP, it’s just really weak relatively. A lot of people still run FT for various reasons /shrug.

Take Melandru runes for a little defense against condi/stun.

I also like to use a sigil of blood/leaching for extra heals.

Med kit can do just fine and is good for the fury on a power build. Turret isn’t at it’s best unless you are blasting the water fields.

Elixir S is a better choice than mine as others have suggested.

I would recommend running a mix of Knights/Cavaliers for WvW.
Probably just ’zerk it up for sPvP.

Power engi can shred people with a solid combo, good luck!!

Manuhell.2759:

Blindingly nerfing is useless if they can’t provide a decent alternative. And incoherent if you do it only with some classes (hello, carefully-shaved healing signet).

This isn’t a blind nerf.
Players, Engi mains included, have been calling for an AR (and other total immunity to some degree) nerfs for a long time and it has been one of the few legitimate balance calls to appear on these forums.

Most of this both doesn’t really matter and applies to everyone.

All of the Engineer specific changes I’ve seen seem fair.

Good, 50% is perfect. Now it would be nice for all 100% immunity skills to see relative nerfs.

It’s mystifying that Perplexity runes still exist in the game at all. Added them to PvP would be a complete and utter “f k you” to the community.

She needed the Dredge/Flame for her magic detector tech and the Pirates/Inquest for her flying/robot tech.

Other than that, I don’t know whether it was really thought through, given how utterly bland the story was.

There will no doubt be blog posts/wiki updates cobbled together and thrown out soon enough in the pretense that they’d considered these details, but if they had in truth, the in game story wouldn’t have been so awkwardly hollow in the first place.

Story: 2/10

Rife with missed opportunity and moving at a glacial pace, the story was extremely poorly presented with the meat often hidden off in some random corner of the world, or worse, simply existing as an out of game blog post or wiki update.
Additionally, despite solid voice talent, the dialogue was painfully cringe-worthy.

Gameplay/Content: 8/10

Generally excellent, with numerous highlights: Both new dungeons, Jubilee solo arena fights, EotM, everything about Bazaar and all the thoroughly brilliant minigames.

I am not personally a fan of the simple, ultra easy, zergy loot grind patches (nightmare tower, LA finale) but a lot of people really loved them, so it’s great to have that mixed in also.

All in all, it’s been a great ride with GW2 content wise and I’m very much looking forward to more (especially the new maps/modes for sPvP)

Some of the Heavy gear is fine.

The rest is absolute kittening trash.

It’s surprising the devs don’t have enough pride in their game to build even half decent looking armours for non-human races, given there was so much care put into the absolutely gorgeous environments.
Did ANet fire the guy who built the Chef’s gemstore outfit? The utter lack of quality makes no sense after they’ve proven great things are possible.

Having characters which look so jarringly ridiculous really kills immersion.
This includes NPCs of course, some look kittening terrible with high res skin textures contrasting violently with their mismatched, poorly coloured rags. So warped and stretched is the clothing that they may as well be wearing 10 square pixels.

Oh guys, I know how to fix the ‘zerker meta, we implement a mechanic which actively vilifies condition users! Aren’t I clever? /sarcasm

What. The. kitten.

The notes were fake. How the biscuit do people STILL not know that?

Hey forums, press “b”.

Go to WvW map.

If that’s too hard, try any city

Stop embarrassing yourselves. None of you are truly as idiotic as you’re acting, right?

Consider a rock paper scissors set-up.

Excluding the entire skill factor (which honestly is more significant but these are MMO forums after all), we have conditions > DD burst > tanks.

Conditions exist as a particularly effective counter to evading/stealthy specs burst which put all their eggs into the damage basket.

Here’s why we get so much of this kitten here:

A lot of players, especially newer or PvE focused players, will come into PvP with their burst spec.

They ignore cleanse and find that conditions are an extremely effective counter to them.

They skip the whole, “try what you consider OP” step to realise they are wrong and revise builds to be more universally effective then rush straight to the forums with their often embarrassingly illogical arguements.

Then, all of a sudden, despite immunity and huge amounts of passive/active cleanse available for balance we have a “condition meta”.

No-one reasonably considers that burst specs might die just as fast as they kill…

Anyway, good luck with your imagined demons and blatant refusal to adapt forums!!

Easier solution OP:

Step 1. Get good.

Step 2. Meet other solid players.

Step 3. Play Team Queue together.

Step 4. …

Step 5. Profit.

Strategies for each:

Decap Engi: Stability.

Pistol Whip Thief: Stunbreaker + dodge.

Minion Master: AoE.

Caed: Moar skilz

’Zerk Offpoint Staff Ele: stare at menacingly.

Hambow: Kite.

E.Z.

Good luck OP.

There was a panel about 5 months ago (can’t find the link, maybe someone else knows which panel it was?) where someone asked and the dev response was basically “Most people play humans, so it’s not worth our time”.

There hasn’t been a single mention of the issue since.