Probably warrior. It doesn’t have a lot of buttons, but has solid survivability, mobility, and damage. It’s got room to learn to play very well, like any class, but it’s one of the easiest to learn without having a serious drawback.
Just make sure you look up a pvp-viable build like hambow or shoutbow: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Warrior_-_Hambow http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Warrior_-_Shoutbow
Both of these are pretty straightforward to get started. The first things you should learn:
1) Weapon swapping regularly
2) Clearing condi with cleansing ire and/or shouts
3) What skills do the most damage, and practice landing them.
4) How to play the downstate game with stuns, fears, stability, and banner (depending on spec).
Almost all of those lessons will apply to other classes, should you choose to branch out.
Bunker guard or engineer(turret) are also options because you won’t die easy, but you won’t kill much either. Well maybe you will with turret engineer, depending on your opponents…
(edited by Brigg.6189)
Except that right now top leaderboard players are likely the ones advancing their MMR the most, I.E. winning poorly predicted games.
The good thing about the system is that you’re going to have to play consistently all season to be on top. I’ll be very surprised if the leaderboard looks anything like it does right now in 1 week.
I’m still not sure if the games played vs. skill balance will be right, but we’ll see in the coming weeks.
If any single amulet was going to be the most meta, I would pick celestial.
Does no one remember the bunker/power meta where any given player would either get blown up instantly, or never die?
Yes, cele is over-represented right now, but only a small adjustment is needed (to either cele or might stacking).
Here’s the thing too. Right now skilled, low MMR players will probably surge ahead because they’re winning matches they’re not expected too. Eventually when MMR adjusts, their scores should stagnate, and only players with consistent high winrates and high MMR will succeed.
The balance between win rate and games played on leaderboard rank just can’t be analyzed until some time has passed. Way too soon to pass judgement.
@Kitt: Lexiceta is rank 456? What are you talking about?
I would reserve judgement for a few days on the system, let it stabilize.
Yeah I agree with this, and I think aoe spam is the culprit. It was something devs talked about changing just after launch, but never did.
Mostly agree. Next thing to do would be to start improving underused specs imo.
Yup, I understand the “one” rule, and I understand the intention. Do you think something is actually wrong in my post? Celestial isn’t that hard to kill in 3v3 on any class.
I don’t know if it’s been nerfed too much, there are a couple competitive builds.
I do think it’s been nerfed in the wrong ways though. Pigeonholed into tanky dps celestial or soldier bow builds. Too much reliance on CI-LB and healing signet.
It’s great that you’re hosting a tournament, thanks for that. That said, some of your rules seem very strange.
If you want to ban celestial because of balance reasons that’s your choice, but I wouldn’t call it a bunker ammy. Also it’s disallowed on warrior and ele but allowed for engi?
The judge’s discretion is also kind of strange. I think it’s better have precise rules not discretion, but if you want to do it that way will you at least be pre-clearing teams before the tournament? I’d hate to see teams having to completely redo comps on the fly.
What? Greatsword warriors are OP now? Did I miss one meta?
You know, if the heart of the post is that OP want’s more statistics available, I can totally agree with that. When it comes to making balance decisions based on those stats, that’s a much harder question.
I’m not going to argue with just having more data available though, I think that’s a fin idea. The devs said they have some new backend systems upgrades, if it’s reasonably possible to add things like this, I’d love to see it.
And with the 45 min queues in this bracket, those top players start intentionally tanking rating so they can actually play. At least, that’s what happened in Wildstar. I’m not sure either game’s population can support brackets just like the major esports games.
Would it be so bad to have teams of above average players paired with 1-2 grandmasters on each team?
I don’t think deaths/match (or similar) is a good metric for efficacy. If a player runs from a point to avoid dieing, and his opponent stays to capture the point, that’s a victory for the opponent without a kill.
Do kills/deaths affect the outcome of a match? Yes, but it’s one of many many factors. You can’t measure class efficacy based on that alone.
It’s odd that you mention mesmer too, because yes, PU mesmer is one of the best dueling specs, but a poor TPVP specs. Outside of mass invis the spec offers very little to its teammates, and the dps is low enough that it can’t take points effectively, nor can it decap points effectively. It has grave drawbacks playing in the conquest mode despite seeming very strong.
Nightshade, you say you’re willing to learn. Several people have mentioned this, but you need to learn mesmer. Not because you want to be cheap, but so you can learn the strengths/weaknesses. I really think if you do that you’ll have a different outlook.
The Glorious Hero’s Armor is a skill-based reward. I’d wager that the players who top the ladders are all skilled players in some regard.
If you don’t think they are, you have until Dec 2 to knock them out of the top 20.
Well, I think most everyone is familiar with how easy it is to game the leaderboards. I’d kind of prefer that the reward was just based on peak rank over X amount of time or some such.
Oh well, let the games begin.
So is it armor for top 20 players on Dec 2 server restart, or armor for anyone that’s reached top 20 before Dec 2?
I think he’s right. Lore wise GvG in GW1 has nothing to do with “The Guild Wars” that the game’s named after. http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Guild_Wars
What class has too many stuns?
Well, you’re right these posts are dime a dozen.
If it makes you feel better, there’s strong rumors that a lord rush style map is being worked on, and you can already do 8v8 matches in custom arenas. There’s also a significant WvW community doing organized GvG matches. I think 15v15 is popular.
If you aren’t going to post meaningful comments with reasoning behind your statements, leave. I don’t care for your opinion and whether you think it’s a L2P issue unless you provide good reasoning to back it up.
It’s not a L2P issue. I admit when I simply need to get more skilled, such as when I first started playing Counter Strike. Yes, it’s a FPS, but it’s a PvP game with online interactions and combat. General PvP flaws is mainly what I’m talking about here. In CS, it was clear that some people are just really skilled at nailing headshots and moving tactically and what not. In this game, the people that succeed are not skilled, they just know how to abuse the most over-powered and broken mesmer/thief moves. I played a thief char in PvP and found it very easy to use.
It’s not a question of skill, just knowledge. Look, I remember getting into pvp here, and it is overwhelming because lots of classes have crazy abilities that seem OP until you really understand what they’re doing. If you want to improve, you have to start learning what’s going on.
It’s difficult to respond to your original post because it’s so general. The best I can do is give examples of things related to what you mention, but really you need to post what classes you think have too good of a downed state, or stuns, or escapes, to tell you how to deal with it.
Downed state – Necro, warrior, ranger, guardian, and engineer all have a down state cc, that can be countered by doing blind, aegis, stability, stealth, or invulnerability. Thief, mesmer, and ele can all move once in downed state, so they will be able to escape your first stomp. Some classes can counter that with teleport stomps, but in general you need to choose to just kill them with damage, or to get the kill with the 2nd stomp. Those three are all squishy classes, which means they take a lot of downed damage.
Stuns- Countered by stability and stunbreaks, and knowing what the class can do. The most frustrating CCers right now are warrior, necro, and engineer. Warrior stuns can all be dodged, and are all melee so they can also be kited when using hammer. Necro fears are difficult to deal with, but the fears are fairly long cd, and the necro has few escape moves if you apply pressure. Still though, only fight them if you have stunbreaks or stability ready. Engineers typically have a pull and a melee knockback, and will try to chain those. The pull is dodgeable, the knockback can be avoided by kiting, but you should stunbreak it if they catch you.
There’s already been some talk about mesmers and thieves so I’ll stop here for now, but I can add more later.
Pretty much everything posted here is a L2P issue. If OP is interested in actually fixing these problems, post your class/build, and what enemies give you the most trouble (thief/mesmer?), then people can explain how to deal with it.
There’s no issue IMO with allowing cancel casting autos to be more efficient, but it’s a problem with stow weapon lightning whip because of the results you achieve with healing signet.
The benefit is too strong in that situation. I have no issue with players being able gain a benefit by being able to use their mechanical prowess to unconsciously gain a minor upper hand. It’s just too much with the elementalist right now.
You do realize that we live in an era of 12 button programmable mouses and keyboards that can run multiple in game actions at the click of a button?
This is a case of hardware superiority not mechanical
What does this have to do with anything?
My opinion is that if someone can pull off the timing of stow weapon casting on top of everything else they’re doing, I don’t mind if they have a slight advantage, I mind when it’s at the effectiveness the elementalist is currently at.
He means it’s very easy to automate perfect cancels using mouse (or other) macros to do it for you. That’s doesn’t really take skill, just the right hardware/software.
I do like cancel casting when it allows interesting combos or the ability to fake cast, but just as a pure dps/hps increase, meh. I’d rather using abilities be about using them intelligently, anticipating and reacting, rather than in just a pure APM kind of way.
Super you back from wildstar too ? =/
I hate to recommend it, because it’s the most meta class right now, but it sounds like you want to play ele.
D/D ele is the meta spec and has medium close range damage, lots of healing, and mobility. Just strong all around, maybe too much so.
The icing on the cake is that there’s two other decent options: staff ele and fresh air.
Staff ele can give you ranged group healing and some aoe damage/cc.
Fresh air is a mid-close range spike dps with decent mobility. Outclassed a little bit by thief and guardian roamers, but it’s doable if you’re good.
Put me in, coach.
The MMR spread between a rank 3 and 97% can actually be very small. Your leaderboard rank (for the top players) is your position in a sorted list, and does not represent the distance between players other than to say one is lower than the other.
Wait….what?
He’s just saying leaderboard lists players, it doesn’t show how far apart MMR is.
Imagine if you had 100 people rated perfectly even at 2200 or something, and one guy at 2199. He gets ranked at #101, but his rating is barely different than the #1 guy.
I think the more major factor is just how much the time-decay messes with everything.
Ok, reran the numbers after a couple days worth of voting. Here’s the score:
Ele 4.49 A+
Eng 4.27 A+
Teef 3.68 A-
War 3.58 A-
Mes 3.54 A-
Guard 3.37 B+
Nec 3.16 B
Rngr 3.02 B
My cutoff for S tier is four point five (how did that get censored), so ele is hovering just barely under that.
So what can be taken away from this? Here’s some opinions:
- No one seems to be viewed as grossly underpowered. That’s my favorite tidbit coming out of this as it’s rare to see decent performance out of every class at once.
- Guard, Nec, Ranger, Mes, War, and Thief are separated by just over half a point of rating. That’s also really nice to see.
- Ele and engi seem to be slight outliers, both at high A tier. It sounds like they can be beaten, but perhaps slightly too good at too many situations compared to other classes.
(edited by Brigg.6189)
Read first: There are many factors that go into overall class effectiveness: skill, build, comp, teamwork, opponent, etc. This tier list is to get a general idea of how well a class can perform in SPVP. Special cases or situations can be discussed in the thread, but for the poll, please answer this specifically:
When played well, with the best available build and competent teammates/opponents, this class performs:
S: Superior – Dominates outcomes of matches, no counters easily available
A: Above Average – Strongly influences the match, difficult to counter
B: Average – Contributes well to match outcome and has balanced strengths and weaknesses
C: Below Average – Not much potential to affect outcome of match, or is only situationally effective
F: Not viable – Dominated by other classes, rarely effective
Elementalist
Engineer
Guardian
Mesmer
Necromancer
Ranger
Thief
Warrior
Other notes:
- This poll is for 5v5 games. Team and solo queue can be considered, but the emphasis is on what works in a situation with good players and teamwork.
- If there are multiple builds available for a class, consider the strongest one.
- Not for hotjoin
- Not for duels or 2v2s
- Not for skyhammer
- Not for evaluating multiple class builds. Use class forums or metabattle for that.
If you want to go into more detail than just the general response, do it in the thread.
Update 10/17:- For a quick and dirty ranking list, I gave every class a score from their average rating (1-5), and then assigned a letter +/- to it. Here it is:
Ele 4.49 A+
Eng 4.27 A+
Teef 3.68 A-
War 3.58 A-
Mes 3.54 A-
Guard 3.37 B+
Nec 3.16 B
Rngr 3.02 B
(edited by Brigg.6189)
Coming from a viewer, DPS did a great job. Casting was good, camera was good, no complaints.
Hrmm, I always thought it felt pretty good. Could it be ping related, maybe server lag?
also would increase queue times
There’s specific combos and builds that are very important. Most cases are self combos, but team combos can make a difference too. Here’s a couple examples:
Might stacking: Fire field + blast finisher. Ele, warrior, and engi can all self stack this with meta builds, and it’s very important.
Aoe heals: Water field + blast finisher (or leap for self heal). Ele, ranger, and engi can self combo for this. Having teammates blast ele or ranger water fields is good play.
Aoe stealth: Smoke field + blast finisher (or leaps for self stealth). Thief and engi are the field providers, anyone on the team could blast this for aoe stealth. Stealth plays can be a huge deal.
There’s others that are important, but I feel like those are the biggest.
Obviously not a huge sample, but the class representation from that list is phenomenal:
g…..w….t….n….m….el….en….r
3…..3…..2….2….2…..4……2……2
(edited by Brigg.6189)
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I’m not sure if it’s a good ROI but it’s not ridiculous.
NPCs in pve events already follow basic scripts for going to a location, capturing, and killing whatever is around. There’s already (albeit pretty poor), training dummies in the mists that use class abilities. Put those together, add a little spit shine, you might have something poorly passing as a pvp ai training mode.
Oh my mistake, nice job then. Yeah, I would post the formula though, doesn’t need to be fancy, just so people know what you’re doing isn’t magic.
Well it’s not an awful idea. Pretty much trying to counteract what makes the leaderboards kittenty.
If you want people to take it seriously though, you should probably come up with a standard formula for ranking people, and post it. Right now, it looks like you just kind of did it however you felt like, and that doesn’t mean much.
Something like rating = exp(1-games/10)/(avg rank). Games would be games per month, with the exp term there to give it some diminishing returns.
Last I checked the highest percentage you could be without being top 1000 was 96%. That would mean those 1000 are 4% of the population, or 250/1%. That means total pop ~= 25000.
But yes, keep in mind that a huge fraction of that is probably inactive.
Also FYI, I did a quick survey of hotjoin once on the weeknight out of boredom. There was ~ 400 ppl playing.
A huge part of doing well is to have a good build. Not all good builds are meta, but that’s the bar by which other builds are judged. If you want to learn warrior quickly, master the meta THEN make your own builds.
For places in range of thief shortbow, are blink spots the same between mesmer and thief?
4/10 troll. Kitt is stepping his game up.
Did anyone notice Shad and Misha vs. celestial eles in the last tourny? It was like <2s kills.
every meta worst meta
Actually looks pretty accurate, nj. I do prefer to run GS/LB with zerk or assassin though. The mobility lets you deal with reduced survivability.
The trick to med guard imo is that they can delay a lot of damage, but they don’t have true sustain. Focus on dodging their big animations, staying out of symbols, and let them use up their cooldowns. You should be able to outlast them if you play conservatively.
Anticipate that they’ll start their rotation with a couple blocks, and that they’ll use the shelter heal when they get low. Here’s a link to a standard build so you can see what you’re up against: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Guardian_-_Meditation_DPS
uhh, a good thief can wreck unorganized players. Toker is #1 on soloqueue right now, just sayin.
Does nobody remember ~1 yr ago when the common forum complaint was “everyone is either burst or bunker”? It’s an awesome situation where it either takes forever to score a kill, or it takes < 1 sec. I’d take celestial over that.
That said, it’s fine to tune numbers if needed. Last year, nobody ran celestial. If now nobody runs it, then yes, you could reduce it. I really think it’s the might stacking that puts this over the top though. Notice that it’s classes that can weapon swap for might most efficiently that are really strong here?
This is a really strange post because this stuff you’re blaming here is not core to a FPS. I could just as easy blame skyhammer on huttball, for example. Whatever, that’s kinda nitpicking.
Hotjoin is, and has always been a place to practice your mechanics, not for strategy or evaluating build strength. That’s OK, I like having a place like that. The problem is the rampant team stacking and spectator gaming ruining even that. It could be improved simply imo: a player that switches to spectator may not rejoin a team for the remainder of the match.
Huttball has been discussed ad naseum. It really just boils down to not having easy access map kills, it’s just too much. I