Guild Wars 2

Did you ever think that just because they adapt to it doesn’t mean they find it more fun? Or what about people like me who had their build buffed to untouchable god tier and had to ‘adapt’ by finding a way to stay awake while playing?

Distracting strikes is cool and all but it seems like it’d be more suited to building around interrupts only, such as hammer + mace/shield. Berserker’s power, on the other hand, looks like Khorne’s gift to skull crackers. A 20% damage boost for 10 seconds right after you skull crack someone is insanely good, especially combined with the extra 10%’ers you get from forceful greatsword and stick and move.

I’m surprised how little people seem to be talking about wrath of justice especially given all the bellyaching going on about the loss of glacial heart. Adding immob to your next attack with an instant cast is incredibly useful. It’s like panic strikes from thief but you can actually control when it goes off.

Anet’s design is what decides what the best builds are, the players just discover them. Viable is a meaningless term in the context of pve though because the content is solvable, meaning there’s never anything stopping you from doing the provably best strategy, so the only terms that can be applied to pve builds are optimal or not optimal.

The only nerf thief is taking here is to their ‘complain on the forums that Anet only nerfs thieves’ trait.

If there are no superior arrow carts, what will the bad defenders sit on while they hide from their enemies? And if there are no omega golems, what will they blame when they inevitably lose?

Don’t forget that all numbers in the preview should be considered placeholders.

phys.7689:

Coldtart.4785:

How did you watch as most of the currently useless traitlines got massively buffed into possible overpoweredness and conclude that build diversity has been reduced?

If your build got nerfed then your build was probably bad.

power is not build diversity. Those are two separate things.

I feel like overall many classes got buffed.

However its also true that there looks like there will very little diversity. for most of the jobs i play regularly there will be like 1 or 2 builds everyone will be using, because the other ones are mostly illogical.

power up, diversity down.

i think the mileage varies from class to class though

You just can’t get enough of being wrong, can you? To give an obvious example; right now there is exactly one correct trait point allocation for ele in pvp: 00266. If you aren’t using that you are simply using ele wrong. Under the new system it appears as though it would be reasonable to run a similar build using water and arcane but with a choice of fire, air or earth all being viable as the third spec. That’s 3 valid choices where before there was only 1.

Damage modifiers are multiplicative so that’s a 52% damage reduction (108.33% effective HP increase).

You can also add stone heart to that to make one of the strongest counter burst tricks in the game by reducing your foes damage to 48% of standard non-crit down from potentially 165% of standard non-crit with fire and air procs. That means they’re doing only 29% of their potential dps even without factoring in lost sigil procs.

How did you watch as most of the currently useless traitlines got massively buffed into possible overpoweredness and conclude that build diversity has been reduced?

If your build got nerfed then your build was probably bad.

TIL meta in all 3 game modes = weakest profession.

Meaning you’ll have gotten at least 4 ticks before anyone interrupts it instead of 0.

Ether renewal is buffed by the fact that you can now run rock solid without mucking anything else up. It’s also gaining a skill category so you can potentially trait it as well.

Run earth, water and arcane and enjoy being able to reduce any zerker’s dps down to zero!!! every time you pop earth attune.

The gist of this topic seems to be that you think it’s bad that your options will be mostly viable instead of mostly useless.

There’s going to be a ready up episode tomorrow where they’re going over every redone trait in the entire game so it’s useless to speculate now.

Actually you can make more viable options by reducing the total number of options. The more customisation you have the less likely it is that any given combination is actually useful. The card game Yomi has 20 fixed 55 card decks that are all tournament viable. If instead you could make your own 55 card deck using any of the cards in the game there would be 3.77×10^93 combinations and almost certainly only 1 best deck that you should always use if you’re serious about winning.

Flamealchemist.2681:

Ever tried to waste the CD of the other zerg by making false pushes???

Ah the classic ‘hope your enemies are unbelievably bad’ strategy. It’s trivially easy to wait until it’s too late to feint and cc bomb then.

Diversity is a function of the number of meaningful choices. If you go from 1000 possible choices with only 10 viable ones to 100 choices with 20 viable ones the diversity has increased.

Most classes have 0-1 viable builds in any given game mode right now. How exactly do you figure that anything could result in less build diversity?

Back in my day I had to actually look at the screen while playing to be an effective ele.

Edit: btw rangers and engis still suck since they rely almost entirely on blockable projectiles when pirate shipping.

phys.7689:

Its still a team game, you cant win on your own, but how well you played actually has more to do with success or failure than other content.

In a team game, I cooperate with my team. In marionette, I sat around watching a completely unrelated team’s failure count as my own.

Contribution was more visible, but mattered less. The outcome was the same whether you killed your regulator in 30 seconds or 119 seconds. If even one platform failed, then my contribution was reduced to the same level as the losers even though I won.

I felt like the marionette made my contribution matter less, not more. I couldn’t even count the number of times my platform would kill our regulator only to then sit around twiddling our thumbs and watching another platform fail and negate our own contribution.

The reason why blasting staff is bad isn’t because it’s a weak trait; it’s the exact opposite. Blasting staff is such a massive improvement and untraited staff is so bad that it’s just not reasonable to play staff without blasting staff.

Consider that most of the damage on staff comes from 120 radius attacks. This gives them an area of 45238.9 square range units. With blasting staff that goes up to 180 radius and 101787.6 square range units; more than double.

Mandatory pick traits are bad in general because they negate any intelligence around making a build.

1. Trait devamp.
2. NPE.
3. Ascended gear.

The standard double stab guard could produce a total of 60% stab uptime if you ran 2 per party, which was standard amongst good guilds. That means that 40% of the time a single cast of line of warding or static field could stop an entire group of even the best players in the game in their tracks.

Stab vs lines used to depend purely on coordination and not even slightly on numbers. Now it’s just a crutch for the bigger group. Why play intelligently when spamming lines is just as good?

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

snip

Lmao eotm wasn’t easy enough so he had to hack and still managed to get killed. That’s some real esports there.

Rabid condi mes is much tankier than a power shatter mes but also has to rely on sustained damage because it has no spike. That sounds more comparable to the cele bruiser builds than to power shatter mes, while power shatter is more similar to thief. It doesn’t seem valid to compare condi shatter to power shatter directly because their roles are so different. Instead they should be compared to other builds that can perform a similar role, which would tend to show that power shatter is on the low end of viability and condi shatter just isn’t viable at all.

ITT: people act like everyone was running around with permanent stability.

If CC based builds were so useless, why was the standard warrior’s primary weapon hammer? It’s damage isn’t the highest of all warrior weapons and it has no team support other than CC.

The other starter zone bosses have much more reasonable pre event times and take 2-3 minutes to kill. Fire elemental has 10 minutes of pre event and takes only 24 seconds to kill. It’s way out of line.

coglin.1867:

(many felt the stability was op)

Many were wrong, then.

Vayne.8563:

This would be far far ;more of an issue if there weren’t a daily cap for achievement points. Let’s say in the course of three years you get this a dozen times. It means it’ll take a dozen extra dailies at some point to MAX OUT your dailies anyway.

There’s no real reason to assume you NEED to do dailies every day since at some point they’ll stop counting anyway.

There are also PvP rooms set up for people who don’t like to PvP to get dailies fast WITHOUT PVPING.

That is to say the players in those rooms cooperate instead of compete so everyone gets the daily. It’s faster to do that for a single daily or even two than to do even the simplest fractal on the lowest level.

You may not enjoy doing it, but if you’re that uptight about getting those ten achievement points immediately there is another option.

So I have to choose between making progress or having fun? Why should I have to make that choice?

This is a game. Having fun is literally the only thing that matters. If a system requires me to choose between progress or fun, that system is bad.

dancingmonkey.4902:

What server are you on?

What are signatures?

You are vastly overestimating the effectiveness of arrow carts against anyone better than a 11111 blobber.

McWolfy.5924:

Finaly melee trains not unstopable. I like it

Back when melee was at its absolute strongest, VR was stopping them. It’s a simple matter of being good at the game.

The logic that defends these dailies is bizarre. ‘You can’t finish your daily without doing something you don’t like, but some of those things are easy so that makes it OK’.

Siege being unable to move in open field is a disadvantage because it also can’t avoid being killed. No group we ever lost to was using open field siege when they won. Even using siege to defend bases is questionable compared to direct combat. Taking a tower against VR was near impossible, taking a tower from siege spammers merely took longer.

thehipone.6812:

Don’t listen to
The Scrubs

You aren’t playing to win if you use open field siege. It’s such a laughably bad tactic. If you’ve read more of Sirlin’s articles you would also have seen where he defines optimal play as being playing in a way that is least exploitable. Open field siege is insanely exploitable. Open field fighting gives you tons of room to move. Throwing down siege just takes that away from you because siege can’t move at all. You’re getting all of the disadvantages of defending a fort without any of the advantages.

I’ve done plenty of guild vs zerg in my time. The only thing easier to beat than a massive zerg is a massive zerg that sits on arrow carts and waits for you to kill them.

Not only is open field siege a mark of being unimaginably bad at the game, it’s not even a good strategy. It’s analogous to people that sit at maximum range at a world boss like the caledon wurm despite this being less safe than getting into melee with it. In trying to go for the safe easy mode you’ve actually used a weaker strategy and made yourself more likely to lose.

When I was actively playing in a gvg guild I found that any group that used open field siege was much easier to beat than groups that would be willing to risk themselves in a real fight.

The most achievable compromise I can see being possible between armour and outfits is to allow toggling between the outfit hat/shoulders/gloves/boots and your armour hat/shoulders/gloves/boots, since these slots don’t use weight specific meshes.

Amusingly, negation mechanics actually make glass cannon builds less viable in pvp, because when your only defence is a good offence and dodging is an uncontested skill, (read: not skill at all) you basically have no offence or defence.

At the end of the day, all pve is solvable and all ai are programmed to lose. There will always be an objectively best way to play any pve content in any game that has been or will ever be made. Changing that way to something else won’t suddenly make this not true.

As much as I like jumping puzzles, they’re still pve. There should be less pve in wvw, not more.

I’ve been directly focused by multiple spite signet necros in a single fight before and barely even noticed it. Condi is absolutely useless.

While I was levelling an alt in frostgorge earlier today I noticed something odd about how some of the svanir mobs were acting. It seems that, in addition to gaining several new attacks they never had, these mobs are now strafing, back-pedalling, dodge rolling, avoiding aoe rings and not engaging when on low health. I even saw a svanir ranger cancel his barrage channel to reposition.

Could it be that Anet is testing its shiny new AI routines?

Pve balance doesn’t matter.

^ Watch as the self-righteous tries to maintain his moral high ground and manufactured outrage against the very people he was being outraged ‘on behalf of’.

Words have no power. Being offended by a word is an invention of self-righteous people, because being ‘right’ is more satisfying than doing the right thing.

If only eles couldn’t do the same thing from 1200 away.

Edit: stripping stab that is.

rapthorne.7345:

There’s absolutely nothing prestigious about anything, ever.

Fixed that for you.

Manufactured outrage offends me, as does censorship.

Here’s a fun fact. Sinister originally means left-handed, but I do not qq endlessly on tumblr when someone uses it to mean evil. The language another person uses casually is not a personal attack on you, because you just aren’t important to at least 99.995% of the population of this planet.

Rofl prestige. I made sunrise for me, not for some imaginary internet points.

Is this the real life? Is this just tumblr?