Guild Wars 2

Skills split between different game modes should not change how a skill works, for consistency reasons.

However, it’s so easy to just change a few numbers that will not at all change how/when a skill is properly used.

This debate is really silly, heroes in MMO games are still heroes even though end game typically has tons of group content.

The nitpicked definition of a hero doesn’t dictate what type of content developers push in MMOs. It’s the game genre that’s relevant here.

MMOs are social, there are endless popular, single player RPGs on the market for complete solo immersion

Armor in PvP? All the pieces you can’t hide, chest, legs, boots, wear those. If you have any item in all of those spots, you are maximum armor value in PvP. After that, it’s purely cosmetic

morrolan.9608:

Josh Davis.6015:

The Lesh Prince recently developed some tech that makes skill-splitting more feasible than it was previously – you’ll see some PvP (and PvE) splits in the next balance update. It’s important to understand that changes will still need to be global, but we’ll definitely have a bit more flexibility moving forward.

I don’t understand this. The engine has always had the capability of balancing spvp and pve/wvw separately. Early on they were balanced separately.

Technology to simplify the skill splitting process, reducing it to a more sensible workload

Agemnon.4608:

As far as stronghold goes I think we need to have a gamemode where both sides try destroying gates and the gates can be healed and it would have a maze like layout with plenty of dead ends. Then at the end of the map whoever charges for the full duration on the flag wins. You’d have areas where thieves can’t shortbow 5 up to and others where they can to avoid making thieves too overpowered. Since it isn’t a point holding map tanky sustain builds won’t be as important and the emphasis shifts more towards mobility and damage. You’d have choke points, vantage points, and other features that make for a great map.

Yeah I dunno about mazes and charging a flag or what it is that you suggested being necessary. I don’t see how that changes the way you approach stronghold.

Stronghold will be a fine map if the lane pushing mechanics are changed so wiping out the defending players is the key to progressing.

• Idea #1: Supply system is changed.

Players can now carry a high amount of supply points. Archers and Doorbreakers spawn at set intervals. Instead of supply equalling a minion 1:1, supply goes towards levelling up the base, increasing the starting slow spawn rate of minion waves.

Here’s the important part: killing players will drop a significant amount of supply in addition to whatever supply points they possessed at death. Keeping players committed to lanes by constant waves, and rewarding ganking those lanes – this is of utter importance.

The Supply Depot in the middle of the map would offer a much less rewarding source of supply points than securing kills, but would still be significant enough to fight over.

This simply makes it so teams that are killing players will snowball their lanes fast, and player deaths are more of a focal point than the current: “Kill Guards and Door Breakers at all costs – who cares if I die?”

Perhaps player respawn times could be lengthened as the game progresses as well. Anything to create a reward structure for killing players.

I broke the thread, sorry

Ithilwen.1529:

@Chaith

This dispute is about 3 players being unable to beat a lone Ele. At least one of those was a Ranger who somehow failed to cc.

For the rest, that’s a different issue.

Pro league Elementalist scum using a smurf account to cheat the system, more like!

Pyriall.1683:

Ithilwen.1529:

You’re mistaken. By definition, a healer will be able to tank. That’s one of the primary functions of healing.

The full healer ele does laughable damage. It’s also highly vulnerable to conditions and cc.

You got outplayed.

Oh the irony…

Don’t you mean, outMMRed?

It certainly is interesting about why certain people’s shortcomings are always from getting ripped off by the matchmaker, or unfair nerfs to their profession, where others who are having trouble are simply getting outplayed.

Zelulose.8695:

If they wanted to be fair they would have to make a solo que, a variant 2/3/4 man team que and a full party 5 vs 5 que. Three Modes to que for. Games like league of legends didn’t do this however, because it lengthened que times. I feel however I would rather wait for a fair match than a solo vs duo/trio match up.

That’s funny, I could only imagine the queue time for being split 3 ways for game modes, and 5 ways for party size.

The only thing that’s a must to improve, yesterday, besides stabilized match quality would be queue times under 8 minutes as a must.

Dirame.8521:

Ruins the coherency how? And creates a balance nightmare how? Genuinely asking because I can’t see your perspective on this.

If an Elite Spec is released even as it is in this iteration of the game, it would still have to be balanced with other trait lines in mind. Separating the Elite Spec from the trait line does not change that. You won’t lose coherency with the Trait line it came with because it was built with that trait line in mind, you won’t lose coherency with other trait lines because that wouldn’t make any sense and it wouldn’t be a balance nightmare because when creating the new Elite spec, they should’ve already balanced it alongside the other trait lines anyway.

Some people like the Protect the Doorbreaker PvE race. Catering to one audience “The PvP elite” won’t always get a company more viewers or participants. If Anet wants to build a big game, they have to ask, who is playing Stronghold and who enjoys it? Let’s create a tournament for those people.
So far because Anet has let the PvP elite tell everyone that Stronghold sucks, it’s become a thing that everyone echoes, Stronghold sucks.
This is not to say that Stronghold doesn’t have it’s issues, Elite capping, Archers being useless half the time, etc. But the fact is, even in that state, its still a fun map, let’s cater to the audience that enjoys it and ignore the ones that don’t. They’ve got Conquest right?

If all elite spec utilities and weapons were not restricted to people running that elite spec, it severely limits how unique and different the subsequent elite specs can be. Why? Cause players would have the ability to cherry pick the best weapons, profession mechanic, and utilities. It would amplify balance problems, cause instead of having another overall balanced elite spec, you’d have to micro balance the budgets of each category, weapons, utilities, traits, etc.

Plus, themes clash. Fiery Berserker weapon spells on a conventional tank will just get noped by any developer.

Re: Stronghold, you can’t insinuate that it’s unpopular simply because influencers in the community don’t fancy it, /facepalm. The content will speak for itself, and we’d actually have a loyal Stronghold fan base if it were appealing to any demographic of PvP players.

The new game mode should have catered to those PvP players who don’t like conquest, but as it turns out, that player group isn’t partial to ignoring players and PvE racing either.

Stronghold doesn’t have a significant enough fan base to warrant not changing it heavily, to my knowledge. There is nobody passionate about Stronghold to cater to.

I would propose Stronghold change to have a strong emphasis on players living/dying to progress, as opposed to whether NPCs live or died. No more ignoring players until you kill guards/door breakers/Lord then retreating, if applicable, no more ignoring players and stability capping mist essence. The whole experience is PvP adverse, PvP sometimes doesn’t happen during a game.

If ArenaNet wants to have Stronghold thrive, they need to do more than throw a tournament for an extinct competitive Stronghold scene.

Dirame.8521:

That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is, regardless of what build is made, the player is sacrificing something they would normally take just to make that build. This guarantees there will be holes, or weaknesses and weaknesses can be exploited.

This change wouldn’t be that crazy but that’s just my opinion.

As an example, if something was extremely overpowered in lots of matchups, but still had a counter, that’s not very comforting. Make balance worse just to be able to click multiple combinations of traits in one line? Na, it’s smarter to just wait until more elite specs or weapons/utilities get buffed, or indirectly become better by strong options being nerfed.

It’s actually quite a game changer to the meta builds when you comb over every elite spec possibility, traits would have to change in order to fit. Let’s just hope ArenaNet just runs sensible balance patches with the goal of polishing existing weapons/utilities over time.

Dirame.8521:

Chaith.8256:

Especially stacking Elite Spec traits that all have huge synergy, but had that synergy limited by only being able to pick one at a time. I could make a broken Scrapper build with Adaptive Armor, at the same time as Final Salvo, Rapid Regeneration at the same time as Mass Momentum, and protection on heal at the same time as Perfectly Weighted. It’s just something unnatural that would undermine how the traitlines were designed to limit choices.

But TL;DR is that they’re just whims that are oddly specific and don’t aim to fix anything but a perceived lack of fun. I’d personally rather they do a simple balance pass on weak utilities and weapons.

Awesome! Okay. The question that I have to ask is, what are you losing when you pick Final Salvo, Adaptive armor, Rapid regenration, Mass momentum and protection on heal? And I’m guessing you’re going to put the 3 remaining traits in Alchemy to get Protection Injection, Self Regulating Defenses and HGH right? And based on what everyone runs with the meta Scrapper, they would normally take inventions because it pretty much provides infinite regen and a good level of sustain…?

Hmm, so to get all that stuff you just mentioned, you’re losing mobility when out of combat (Mecha legs), a heal reset (Automated Medical response) and near infinite regen and extra damage (Bunker down). And let’s not forget cleansing synergy, it’s a pretty good adept minor trait.

Sure the build you made is good but… you’re still losing something. You’re still sacrificing something useful to get it. You still have a weakness.

And the whims are aimed to fix build diversity or more like, build “possibilities”. Which then = fun.

I don’t really want to theorycraft with you but if you’re saying the good balance between meta builds we’ve struck will stay, and every profession will equally benefit from unlocking the trait restrictions, that’s just a laugh m8. Not worth, let’s just alter balance in more controllable and deliberate ways

Dirame.8521:

All you guys say is, “I’d rather not” never any examples of why you’d “rather not”. You’re killing me man, killing me!!

“..as there are other ways to have a fun, functional skill balance if ArenaNet so desired any builds to be used in PvP besides going with what the Elite Spec dictates you do.”

I think that separating the traitline from the rest of the Elite Spec goodies will hardly influence the builds we’re using. Just not a change that will improve the game or PvP. Everyone will still need to take Celestial Avatar, Function Gyro, Reaper Shroud, Facet of Nature, etc, which are tied to the traitlines. You’re still restricted in exactly the same way.

And as for selecting opening up the option to double or triple up on the amount of traits you can take from one traitline, that’s just going to exasperate the problem of OP traitlines. Some traitlines have multiple good choices that would be broken in that system, and some only have one good choice per tier in PvP.

Especially stacking Elite Spec traits that all have huge synergy, but had that synergy limited by only being able to pick one at a time. I could make a broken Scrapper build with Adaptive Armor, at the same time as Final Salvo, Rapid Regeneration at the same time as Mass Momentum, and protection on heal at the same time as Perfectly Weighted. It’s just something unnatural that would undermine how the traitlines were designed to limit choices.

But TL;DR is that they’re just whims that are oddly specific and don’t aim to fix anything but a perceived lack of fun. I’d personally rather they do a simple balance pass on weak utilities and weapons.

alemfi.5107:

Chaith.8256:

Automated tournaments sound like a perfect thing to schedule for a 5-roster of players looking to have more competition than leagues allow, which is very little.

Seems like it would be easy to facilitate a tournament signup from the ‘TEAM’ tab in the guild menu, and have a sequence of queue pops for a daily tournament, starting at 8pm in a central time zone of each region.

Have the brackets & team progress displayed on the UI, fully contained in-game.

Gem or skin rewards based on placement would be amazing.

Perhaps I got distracted by the rest of the OP’s content in his post, but after the presentation of the idea of automated tournaments in this manner, it does sound fun/feasible. I remember participating in pugquest, got second place, was fun. I’m just curious though, would this really be able to build the competitive scene more than just regularly scheduled community organized tournaments? It will remove burden from the community sure, but assuming we did have these regular tournaments again, would it have a net benefit between automated vs. community tournaments?

The problem with the community tournaments is that they’re not introduced to players as part of the in-game progression, and not always consistent.

Automated tournaments sound like a perfect thing to schedule for a 5-roster of players looking to have more competition than leagues allow, which is very little.

Seems like it would be easy to facilitate a tournament signup from the ‘TEAM’ tab in the guild menu, and have a sequence of queue pops for a daily tournament, starting at 8pm in a central time zone of each region.

Have the brackets & team progress displayed on the UI, fully contained in-game.

Gem or skin rewards based on placement would be amazing.

As for things in the OP like trait reworks, I’m just gonna say that I’d rather not, as there are other ways to have a fun, functional skill balance if ArenaNet so desired any builds to be used in PvP besides going with what the Elite Spec dictates you do.

Ithilwen.1529:

I’m asking that this thread be closed because virtually every post is an attack and / or ridicule.

Sticks and stones, my fellow pvp ers.

A few, but the majority are just setting the record straight on what Rise does. GW2Wiki / GW2Skills are your friends

dominik.9721:

your whole list is incorrect and even my dog whould have done a more accurate one
…..
daredevil god tier lmao

XerMeLL.6042:

Why would you use a Rifle. Hammer is so good.

Rifle works better with Grenades and is very handy for squishy builds with the ranged poke. The real question is why run a squishy build over a tanky build when squishy builds lack the burst and utility compared to other professions’ squishy builds.

Mesmers don’t need any more advantages over Revenants, that’s for certain!

And easily a feature, it ain’t called relenting assault for a reason, ayyy

Every class is tweaked and balanced individually, it doesn’t come even close to mattering if some professions are balanced around having a few extra or a few less armor points. Only affects a player’s OCD rather than performance. It’s an RPG, you’re gonna have to let some profession discrepancies slide.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Why would I watch a game I could be playing?
.

Yeah, who would watch twitch when they could be playing those games? Judging by Twitch, tons of people is the answer.

Problems with watching gw2 PvP are closer to the fact that it’s just action for ten minutes straight. No chill on at least a medium to larger fight going on.

Gw2 is fun as hell to watch when the fights end rather fast, and the suspense is based around who is engaging, and when.

Skill balance is the big determinant here.

Long fights are serious hype-killers for viewers.

There are some really low hanging fruit type fixes that could immediately make the game much more fun to watch on twitch’

• Visible overhead health bars
• Slow motion replays at game end. Play of the game, anyone?

They have never been anything but useless or cancerous, game ruining, afk play style. Better to give some other kind of currently broken utility some viability instead.

Not a lot of complaints about matchmaking are a problem to deal with, except how it groups puts the bottom half of MMRs on one side vs. the top half of MMRs on the other.

If you see Amber’s in Legend, it’s because they’re partied with someone in that pip range of their own manipulation. All matches take place within a small-ish pip range. Class distribution is hardly a problem, if the players behind them are matched equally with the enemy. In extremely crippling comps like 3 thieves, people just switch.

All the problems are gonna be de-magnified as soon as teams stop being purposefully different in average player skill

Ithilwen.1529:

@Chaith

/offer handshake/ I agree. It’s what ANET should do about it that is important. On that we are in full accord.

Sadly though, if I fail to make Ruby this season I’d need to make Diamond next season. Since that’s unrealistic, ( I’m in T4 Sapphire with over 500 games this season, ) I’m putting in insane hours trying to overcome the current system.

I’m gratified that you agree that the system is “bad.” Perhaps that will help convince some of the people who are still defending it as “skill based.”

Yes, the matchmaker should be striving for the teams to be as even as possible. On that, we are again in full accord.

Your last reply to me was pure righteous indignation and I just re-quote the same message and it’s handshakes and gratification.. yes I feel lots of players are not impressed with the matchmaker quality whether they are winning or losing.

What is your expectation though? ArenaNet hot-fix S3 matchmaking right now to guarantee pip grinders advancement to Ruby if the safe pips in Sapphire aren’t enough help?

While any rational person would agree the matchmaker needs to be more neutral, especially at Legend, you have also climbed too high grinding safe pips and now dis-proportionally blaming the matchmaker for your troubles. The most balanced matchmaker in the world won’t give you 50% win rate in T4 Sapphire.

So try to look at it objectively, not just out of desperation or fear of missing out on The Ascension, cause’ you tie nearly every point back to your current personal league standing.

Ithilwen.1529:

@Chaith..

But that’s just the point of this whole thread. The matchmaker IS favoring one side. It’s favoring the side with the most wins. It is deliberately stacking strong players against weak.

This is not competition. The closest thing I can liken it to is wwf “wrestling” with it’s scripted matches.

If the current matchmaking were transferred to ESL: The highest rated team would play the lowest. The next highest rated would play the next lowest. AND IT WOULD STAY THAT WAY FOR THE ENTIRE SEASON, MATCH AFTER MATCH.

Would you consider that competitive? Would it exhibit skill on the part of the season’s winners?

Just gonna quote myself here:

Chaith.8256:

All good matchmakers simply even the strength of both teams as equally as possible – so obviously the current system is bad

The matchmaker is currently bad, that doesn’t mean your suggestions are fair or beyond critique though. The pro league / WWF analogies aren’t really that helpful either, most people get the idea of how the matchmaker currently works already – it’s like, what should ArenaNet do about it that I care about.

Zynt.5769:

Chaith.8256:

Ithilwen.1529:

The solution is to emulate most competition systems. If you win, you get a harder match next time. If you lose, you get an easier match next time. ANET does the opposite and the results demonstrate that it is not the right logic.

The reason you get easier matches after losing a ton in most games, is because the matchmaker’s opinion of you drops a ton. In GW2, PIPS are a main component of how you’re matched, so you’d have to lose a ton of PIPS for easier matches.

The matchmaker itself can’t start favouring one side based on those players being on a losing streak, that’s just biased in the opposite direction. All good matchmakers are independent trials (no bearing on past win/loss streaks.) All good matchmakers simply even the strength of both teams as equally as possible – so obviously the current system is bad, (a few people suddenly on win streaks disagree that it’s bad).

It is not possible to do what you’re describing unless the league has zero safe pips. If that were the case, who knows if ArenaNet would nerf the achievements so hard that every player in Amber can grind them? Careful what you wish for

I get the feeling Anet wouldn’t nerf the achievements, if there were zero safe pips. They’d want players to strive to get to the higher divisions, in order to earn the reward, to keep them playing it.

We’d probably see the same complaints on the forums, even with pip loss across all divisions. It’d just be “Keep losing pips and I can’t get out of Amber!” instead of “Can’t get out of Tier 4 Sapphire!”.

Yeah, so I’m actually not really convinced removing safe pips is necessary, I’d welcome it, but not necessary.

It would actually allow people who are more progressed then their playing ability to more easily fall into a normal win rate if they lost pips.

What would be sweet would just for matchmaking to revert to both teams being evenly matched, and I’m sure the majority of the crying would stop. Safe pips cause people to be stuck in a higher division, getting a smaller than normal win rate, aka “MMR hell” though, so I’m sure there’d still be tears about that.

Ithilwen.1529:

The solution is to emulate most competition systems. If you win, you get a harder match next time. If you lose, you get an easier match next time. ANET does the opposite and the results demonstrate that it is not the right logic.

The reason you get easier matches after losing a ton in most games, is because the matchmaker’s opinion of you drops a ton. In GW2, PIPS are a main component of how you’re matched, so you’d have to lose a ton of PIPS for easier matches.

The matchmaker itself can’t start favouring one side based on those players being on a losing streak, that’s just biased in the opposite direction. All good matchmakers are independent trials (no bearing on past win/loss streaks.) All good matchmakers simply even the strength of both teams as equally as possible – so obviously the current system is bad, (a few people suddenly on win streaks disagree that it’s bad).

It is not possible to do what you’re describing unless the league has zero safe pips. If that were the case, who knows if ArenaNet would nerf the achievements so hard that every player in Amber can grind them? Careful what you wish for

Xyonon.3987:

That’s not the issue here. The problem isn’t that those traits are bad. Even if they were “good” or simply something different, aslong as the engi doesn’t have some group wide support or in my suggestion case, a unique dmg increasing debuff on the enemy, we won’t get love for raid teams. We have nothing unique to offer, but super speed, but you don’t need that. And even if – stack a few eles and they do the same :/

They can be both good and something that helps Scrappers in raids you know…

But just throwing it out there, the entire Engineer profession isn’t unequipped for raids, especially considering some professions low dps

They just need to do something with Shocking Speed, top Adept major, and Expert Examination, middle master major.

Like, no where in the entire game, across all modes would I see those traits getting play

Ithilwen.1529:

@Pakkazull

It says “everyone.” No, it doesn’t say anyone. This is almost a tautology. In any case, anyone is included in everyone.

Agreed, ArenaNet was clearly addressing everyone, but whether it’s everyone, anyone, or no-one, the emphasis is on what those people will have, which is an opportunity to earn.

Honestly, in my opinion, a good interpretation of the message was that you wouldn’t need to be on a team necessarily or win a major tournament to complete the achievements.

Clearly you’re gonna continue to interpret it in the way that entitles you to that thing you’ve been obsessing over for 6months, but I think this thread is pretty plain in that you’re one of the few that interpreted that statement to entitle all solo queuers without exception.

epoc.7941:

I like engineer, its not my main but if i ever left my main toon i would definitely main engineer. Now ive never felt engi was lacking in sustain at all in fact i think its insane how much they can have especially if you’re good it can be super difficult to kill you. Its frustrating to fight against and super fun if you’re the one behind the wheel.

My only issue is stealth gyro…My gosh when i first got my hands on that thing it was impossible to kill me. As someone who mains thief the art of stealthing and disengaging or stealthing to break target is something i’m very familiar with. Yet unlike with thief where its more of a key function to that classes survival or sustain because theyre so squishy, engi just dominates with it, and its so easy! I would feel so cheap using it (not as cheap as moa but >.> whatever anet) it really is a get out of jail free card especially with the insane amount of sustain available to the class already.

Its not like engis couldn’t already stealth. Other classes that stealth like mesmer and ranger feel no where near as bulky as an engi and thieves have been pushed so far out of stealth is super rare to see anyone run shadow arts anymore. My question is Why this addition to the class? It feels completely unnecessary. Its hard to call for it to get removed from the game as i do play engi and hate being nerfed….but i cant help but feel that it needs some kind of rework or something. I like fair fights maybe its just me….but when you’re not behind the wheel its incredibly frustrating.

can we have a moment of honesty no q.q no insults and just all admit yeah stealth gyro is well. OP….

Instant with 20s CD -> Instant with 40s CD -> 3/4 second Cast time and 40s CD

Agreed, 1.5s Cast time and 80s CD sounds more reasonable, just keep nerfing it, Kappa

(I never use Sneak Gyro as it is currently)

Ithilwen.1529:

@Chaith

This is my most recent match. I am too tired to continue playing.

You’ve learned to git gud and you’re going to take a break from pvping?? I don’t even know you anymore

Yeah people have been suggesting to scale turrets and Gyros off of player stats for literally years, but ArenaNet have said on multiple occasions that it’s not possible because they’re constructs/‘gadgets’.

All balance suggestions are crap unless they create more options and preserve balance. (Besides buffing Guardian meta build). So right off the bat, balance suggestions that affect the top builds need to largely be thrown out, because top build balance is way better than your changes indicate you know.

Buffs to Ele Scepter, Guardian weapons, Thief haste, Ventari Rev, these are sensible changes, you should not suggest changes to abilities used in meta builds – you simply aren’t good at balancing those

shion.2084:

Chaith.8256:

First power build that use Firearms condition traits and Flamethrower. Seems very confused. If you’re looking to hybridize, using the bottom adept & master trait in Firearms and going Sage amulet will work better

Thank you for considering.

With sages I’d lack crit ability. Sure I could get 10% on close range, but that wouldn’t be enough to really make use of what firearms can do. In addition I don’t really need the fury because of elixr B and the extended boon duration.

My sigil of blood would be less effective without a decent crit rate. Lastly when I go into a fight I have a fairly decent fury duration, my opponent will be bleeding, so my crit rate is 80 some odd percent. This makes for a lot of damage even with no ferocity.

Thoughness gives me a bonus to power over sages. I also feel I’m a bit more able to take a burst from an opponent with the toughness and when adaptive armour kicks in this just ups my power more.

I also play this build in and out so I couldn’t count on the range conditional 10%, when I use mortar currently I have a chance to apply bleed, vulnerability, Burning from IP, and crit most of the time.

Its a decent opener if their ele doesn’t have the wind field thing running. If they do have it running I use thunderclap jump around a bit, whirl some, block,down a flame wall for area control on point, blast with ball O fire, giving allies might and doing a lot of damage, acid bomb away and then open wiht mortar fields. Tends to work reasonably well and I can do decent vulnerability stacking.

I don’t mind running Incendiary Powder with Intelligence and firearms crit traits, and perma fury, personally.

First power build that use Firearms condition traits and Flamethrower. Seems very confused. If you’re looking to hybridize, using the bottom adept & master trait in Firearms and going Sage amulet will work better

ellesee.8297:

But I digress, personally I think power grenade Engis would perform well if not for the billions of projectile hate in the meta. And even if projectile hate were to be nerfed I don’t think it would replace the Revenant as the primary physical damage dealer in pro leagues, but would absolutely be worthwhile in high tier queues for those of us who absolutely despise playing the, what I find to be extremely boring, meta hammer build and that’s why I don’t think it should be buffed further.

Outside getting countered by Chrono, Berserker, Reaper, Rev, yeah, if Scrapper and Tempest no longer countered power nades with projectile hate it’d be great.

ellesee.8297:

I suppose power grenadier will never be considered situationally meta because there will never be a situation in this meta where there isn’t some kind of rampant anti projectile spam. But to say it is a bad build overall is just false.

No, it’s not that. It’s about standing up to other well rounded damage builds: Mesmer, Warrior, Necro, and Revenant. Having a fair shot at making an Engineer damage build that can deal comparable damage and survive comparably well against other damage builds, and not be at a huge disadvantage in every case, that’s my reasoning why all the damage builds are bad, not just condition damage options as you say.

I’ve been much more successful on condition flamethrower builds than non-hammer based power builds in fact, but that’s apart from my point.

That feel when you throw a tantrum and boycott Forest when you don’t like the Lord mechanic in Legacy. Haha

ellesee.8297:

Engineer burst builds are still good. It’s just the meta involves a lot of aoe protection spam and projectile hate so it’s not played. They don’t really need buffs. It’s power creep we don’t need.

What needs to be buffed is condi Engi. That build is just worthless. There’s no viable offensive tool for condi Engis atm except a gimmicky Flamethrower build where the only damaging ability it has is Incendiary Ammo, an ability that require multiple hits to reach full effect and is negated by any form of condi clear, all of which have a shorter cooldown than the whopping 50 seconds IA has.

Another issue that needs to be addressed is the heavy reliance on the Alchemy tree. It’s the only trait line that has any form of condition removal and any worthwhile ability the Engineer has that has condition removal on it is buffed by this line. There needs to be more condition removal on things other than Elixirs and Elixir gun.

You can’t have an anti power creep comment and then suggest buffing underpowered roles. That’s just silly.

Non-meta Engi builds are all bad, if power builds are ‘good’ as you say, they would be considered situationally meta in some way.

Poledra Val.1490:

I rarely post in these forums so I was just curious what the current crop of pvp players feel about the state of the game at the moment.

Theres four things for me that come to mind straight away:

Balance: Arguably the most balanced pvp has been in a long while, baring of course Guardian which is widely considered to be the weakest class in the current meta. Saying that I do feel the meta for lack of a better term is rather dry or dare I say a bit dull at the moment.

Build diversity: This is something I wish Arena Net would look into more, more often then not there is one solid build per profession which is used by everyone. Occasionally you may get a couple of good builds per profession but there few and far between.

Metrics/Numbers: This for me is the most worrying thing. The numbers for PvP are dwindling down somewhat. Im aware Overwatch is now in full flow and has probably taken a few numbers out of GW2 PvP. Which brings me to my final point.

Incentives: Baring the legendary PvP backpiece which I would imagine most players would have by the end of this season or next there really is nothing to incentivize players to play if they reach legendary division.

I did suggest as others have that they should maybe create a reward track exclusively for legendary division and that can only be progressed once your in legendary.

In addition the PvP Vendor has not been updated with any new items for us to spend our pvp tickets on for the last several months.

Just my two cents.

Pol

Definitely all very real points that hit home this season.

The focus of the balance team has been to finally strike a balance between the potentials of each profession in PvP, and that’s great, spot on, extremely huge for competitive, but there’s still the problem of no build diversity, an unprecedented few options in traits/utilities.

The ball has been dropped on keeping up with the League Reward Vendor, there’s simply just no rewards for playing in S3 if you’ve played through the content in S1 and S2. How is this acceptable?

The structured / casual PvP in this game is being really hurt by long average queue times, and blowout games.

Working towards something is fun, having build options are fun, getting into the action is fun – short queue times are fun, non-crushing victories and defeats are fun.

Quickness generally not hugely useful for the Engineer due to no strong channelled abilities, the best uses are Auto attacks in Rifle/Hammer.

Goosekilla.2796:

But then we’re back to asking for something way too large for one patch (i.e. buff all core specs to post-HoT levels)… in fact that’s a bigger request than nerfing all elite specs, so I guess we end up backwards there.

That’s the kicker, because if a few professions saw build diversity polish before the others, while it’d be unfair, it wouldn’t pose balance problems because there’d still be the meta builds all at the same power.

Goosekilla.2796:

This is just an idea, but one easy way to nerf all the huge dps would be to just increase all class’s baseline vitality and toughness. That wouldn’t take a huge patch, and would give room to buff and polish all the existing unused traits/mechanics.

Thinking outside the box is good – increasing everyone’s base vitality and toughness however, will definitely throw many things out of whack for the cause of nerfing all the huge DPS.

Pacing of PvP in this game: On the slow side already, but manageable.

How will core-power level abilities and traitlines feel when used where everyone you’re trying to kill has higher base vitality and toughness? Let’s just say, from a wet noodle fight to a staring contest. Except your HoT equipped enemies get a machine gun and baseball bat, respectively.

Salamander.2504:

Agemnon.4608:

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

We’ve landed on a system where you earn pips per win so that players can farm up to Ruby by design. The achievements and legendary crafting are based around everyone being able to farm Ruby, so the system is in sync with the achievements & such.

Honestly, everything would have to be revamped from the ground up – UI, achievements, legendary backpiece requirements.

Probably will never happen.

What they can easily do is try something we’ve never tried – S1 philosophy of even team MMRs, with the S2 league changes so that you must fight enemies in your pip range.

The changes to the league were great. The change to matchmaking was over-compensation and it royally crapped on everything. It’s always something..

Salamander.2504:

I get the issues with this season, and I’m not coming at this from the winstreak perspective (I’m at 58% w/l solo queue, 5 pips till leg as of writing). But, remember the complaints in S1? That skilled players have to compete against each other to gain a pip, whereas lower MMR players only have to beat mediocre players to gain a pip. In this way, mediocre players could climb through the leagues to legend only ever facing other mediocre/bad players. Apparently, their MMR never rose drastically because their wins were never against high MMR opponents, or so the argument went.

There’s got to be some middle ground to eliminate the issue described above as well as the S3 issues you’re talking about. For starters they would have to reduce the MMR range within a given team (i.e., 10 9 5 3 2 vs. 7 7 7 7 7 shouldn’t happen like in unranked), and this combined with the S3 pre-season seeding might help but I really don’t have a clue what else could be done.

Many more things than just the matchmaker were changed from S1. S1 did not require a similar pip range when it matched. Think about the gravity of this change..

The league system should continue to make matches from pip range segments as it does now, I’m not speaking about reverting that, I’m speaking about reverting the matchmaker so available players are as equally distributed amongst both teams instead of stacking one side.

Season3 seems to have introduced this phenomenon where non-high tier players are chosen at random (means unknown to me,) and they experience huge win streaks, crushing victories, and generally no opposition while they roll an entire division in a sitting.

In my personal experience, highly skilled veteran players seem to generally always be stacked and face very little opposition, but now, I’m noticing even players that have known past struggles in the Leagues get on massive streaks of facing enemies that provide little resistance.

Every player who had struggled in the past and suddenly is on a huge tear, “I love S3!” For the rest of average and what I can only imagine as bottom half of the playerbase, “Whelp, this game has taken a huge crap on me.”

Nobody likes this matchmaker except the people who are suddenly winning a 75% of their matches and feel like they’re being rewarded for getting good’.

The above-average to the highly-skilled veterans are falling asleep in queues, and in many matches – crushing their opponents was more fun when they had to sweat for it.

For every player on a huge win streak, there are an equal amount of lose streaks.

Seriously, bring back evenly matched team MMR aka S1. There were improvements that could have been made to it, which I could detail, but the changes made since S1 are horrendous for the casual and veteran experience.

Rezzet.3614:

its not so much the projectile hate as an old time player i have no problem timing enemy blocks and shooting them the problem lies in the fact that when i do shoot at my enemies i end up Critting for 1300 damage and up to 1800 with some might and up to 3k with 250 range blunderbuss while my enemies can dump 8-9k damage bursts on me from 900-1500 range

and then the stupid net shot missing targets right in front

jump shot has great damage so all that skill needs is a half a second evade when jumping

Yep, my thoughts exactly. Blunderbus & Jump Shot are not at all bursty, which just feels wrong. I remember pre-core specs, doing devastating damage to piles of enemies by getting in 250 Range to do max damage with Blunderbus and Jump Shot. I still maintain there were unintended nerfs to Rifle builds with the introduction of core specs, removing Rifle Mod & shifting other modifiers, cause that bursty feeling disappeared before HoT, even.

An Engi/Scrapper building for even a balanced damage build, the results are always crap. Need better results when building for something other than full tank utilities and traitlines. Rifle, Pistols, Kits, Explosives, Firearms, Tools, these are the things that need to be improved in ways other than raw (PvE affecting) damage.

Defensive utility, offensive utility, increased speed, accuracy/precision.

Just one of many (all?) professions that have really bad build diversity. Pretty much all the professions need to be polished a bit so there’s meaningful build choices instead of just 9 standard heroes.

Edit: I agree that the general power level of each profession should be brought down to core level. There’s just one problem with that:

Unless you nerf all 9 professions at the exact same time, (too big a patch) you are having huge balance issues. That’s why I think ArenaNet’s hand is forced into laying in the bed they’ve made when it comes to the general power level of the game.

If the game is going to be polished further so it has a functional trait/utility system, I’m almost sure it’ll involve re-working obsolete core game traits/mechanics.