Guild Wars 2

The Lord is just a bad mechanic to begin with. It essentially takes a 500 point game and turns it into a 350 point game.

The Lord kill shouldn’t be granting points at all, and should rather work like a Temple buff.

I like a skill based system as much as the next guy, but lets be honest, old engi was less about skill and more about simply having a enormous APM requirement + lots of buttons.

The thing I love about scrapper is that it’s not so kit dependent. Juggling 3-4 kits + weapon + toolbelt isn’t challenging or engaging. It’s just obnoxious.

Mesmers are hardly skilless. As far as condi shatter is concerned, clones are just slow moving projectiles.

The only thing that seems over the top to me on Mesmer is the frequency of which they can put out CC.

XxsdgxX.8109:

I’m sure they don’t

I’m 100% certain they do. Gathering such metrics is something developers having been doing ever since online connectivity became a thing. Anet completely understands what builds are and aren’t getting run at all levels of play.

While I couldn’t dig up anything on ArenaNet, here is a sample interview from a developer from a older mmo about that game’s metrics. And given the age of that game, I’m certain that Arenanet can do anything those devs can do.

Ithilwen.1529:

Moa is blockable, dodgeable and has a ridiculously long cast that can be interrupted. This is a learn to play issue.

…and pretty much everything that scrappers and revenants have is blockable, dodgeable, and have cast times. So I guess everyone that complains about revenants and scrappers just have a L2P issue.

Also since when was 1sec considered “ridiculously long?”

That’s not ELO hell, that’s Glicko hell.

This thread is a joke.

Spamming skills is suboptimal on all classes. There is a reason none of the high level players spam.

The reason it occurs is that there is such a insane level of complexity in this game combat that 95% of the playerbase has nfc what they are doing and as such revert to spamming what they do know how to do.

Like how hardly anyone knows how to utilize combo fields properly and as such just spam fields and finishers around with little thought.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Same for reaper’s cancer spread upon entering shroud or various of other passive procs of cancer. I mean condi. Couple that with unblockable marks/wells and this game starts to look like a diarrhea.

To be honest, it would’ve been fine if there was no class stacking. But 4 reapers spreading AoE condi STACKS and chill by just pressing F1? :/ If you counter that you should seriously consider playing the lottery in that particular day.

Reaper’s have all of 0 passive anything while in Shroud. The only way a Reaper can apply condis in Shroud is by utilizing Shroud’s active abilities.

runeblade.7514:

Nerf classes.

Bring them all down so that pre-HoT builds has a chance.

that’s not really possible.

i.e chrono will always be taken because having continuum split + the 4 standard shatters will always be better than just having the 4 standard shatters.

reikken.4961:

PVP is a team thing. If multiple people chain CCs on you, then obviously you’re screwed if you aren’t getting help from allies. And that’s exactly how it should be. But 1v1, you always have options. The main one being avoiding the disable in the first place.

Stunlocking should require teamwork, but in this game it doesn’t.

One of the things I think SW:TOR did right (post 2.0 not vanilla) was how they designed CC so that it was strategic, and how it was impossible for 1 class to stunlock a target to death.

In this game however CC is just something that gets thrown around as part of people’s standard rotations.

Fivedawgs.4267:

Off topic -
But condi are the main source of dps this meta … end of off topic.

Let me guess you never bother to check your damage taken stats at the end of match?

Because I don’t know about you, but on mine Power damage taken is usually 2x to 4x more than condi damage taken.

Jourdelune.7456:

Dethl.2875:

Jourdelune.7456:

Fay.2357:

This thread exemplifies the history of Mesmer in GW2:

1. Mesmer is not meta in competitive play
2. Mesmer has builds that steamroll bad players
3. Bad players get steamrolled and come to the forums to whine about it
4. Mesmer gets nerfed again
5. Mesmer goes from not meta to garbage in competitive play

Here’s to hoping Anet ignores the baddies and doesn’t execute point 4.

Well if you look more at ESL matches… you will see more mesmers than the last week. Next week, you will see some more.

Actually, if you play the RANK game… you probably find 1 mesmer each match from Diamond and up.

Perhaps you missed it, but here again:
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Conquest

The first class in META section, is hybrid mesmer. And it’s not because the admin of this website are Necros…

i don’t really care enough to debate
but the order is alphabetical from the name of the specialization so good job

Quoting for those who can’t read: (look at screenshot)
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Conquest

Yeah… the alpha sort is kinda bug, if it’s alpha sort. (D/F Aurashare on the last line after Power Rev???)

But perhaps you mistaken first (be the best) by first being the first line in the list?

Aftter the META section, you got the GREAT section… did you ever use that website before?

Oupps… -10 for Dal that got Trolled up by a random pvp player.

You realize it’s alphabetical by specialization right?
The meta section is in this order
Chronomancer
Herald
Reaper
Scrapper
Tempest

The “great” section is in this order
Daredevil
Dragonhunter
Druid
Druid
Herald
Reaper

Looks alphabetical to me. As does the rest of the sections.

Laserbolt.6731:

I was just describing the actual reality, not suggesting a solution.

I am nearly certain there is no budget for any kind of big rewrite of the matchmaking programming. I could be wrong, but I don’t see evidence of a lot of resources going into PvP. And the names keep changing in the past two years. Justin O’ Dell was pretty good, and talked to us on the forum.

MMR is fine, the problem is that they keep mucking with it in the name of pips. The old pre leagues system of pure glicko2 matchmaking was fairly accurate.

LordOtto.2650:

Ahahahaha…change the 2 DH to 1 Reaper 1 Engie, and then we will see..make it more fun, put 2 Reaper there… I think your opponents didn’t even had a condi/hybrid Reaper. 4 chill skill and bye bye 4 thieve in instant!

Thieves are probably the class that is the least affected by chill. 66% increase in cd is meaningless when the cd of their main skills is 0. The movement speed decrease is likewise ineffective as most of thief mobility comes from teleports, shadowsteps, and leaps.

Besides maintaining condition uptime on something with the ludicrous amounts of evades and mobility is not even remotely reliable.

Power.2957:

The reality is mesmer has been nerfed so many times since release I can’t even make a comprehensive list because at this point I can’t remember all of the changes.

You can make a similar list for every class in the game, and make every class look victimized.

Nerf counts are irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the state of the class in the current meta.

Having said that I don’t think mesmers need a nerf. Moa however is just plain bad design. The entire rest of the game is built around extremely sort duration CC, where a aggressor has to land several successive CCs in order to stunlock. But then we have mesmers wandering around with this one ability that can singlehandedly lockdown a target.

I think both mesmers and the entire rest of the game would be better served if both the cooldown of and the duration of Signet of Humility was reduced significantly.

Fluffball.8307:

but it would be beyond amazing if anet could somehow quantify profession mixes into MMR.

Impractical. The meta is too dynamic. Not to mention such a system would be fundamentally biased.

Plus we don’t even know if the meta is correct. (let’s be honest, half the meta is based on preconceptions, and the other half of the meta is based on blind faith in proleague players)

Zietlogik.6208:

We have plenty for physical damage already, even in stats with toughness/armor, boons like protection, and conditions like weakness, but not enough of these modifiers for condition damage. The only real option is either Resistance boon or removal.

My point has nothing to do with conditions vs power.

My point was that this game has way too many damage negation effects, with little emphasis on partial mitigation.

The problem with total damage negation is that it’s binary.
Thieves are a great example of this since all of their defenses are total negation. In 1v1s (particularly against classes with a low attack rate) thieves can be practically invincible because they can evade or blind almost everything. However in a teamfight they don’t have enough and tend to die in seconds.
That’s the problem, they either have enough negations for the situation and are nearly invincible, or they don’t have enough and they die horribly. And there is almost no inbetween those extremes.

That’s why this game needs more things like weakness and less evadeframes/invulns/blocks. Weakness provides a strong amount of damage mitigation without being absolute. Weakness also scales with attack rate (although it’s more swingy at lower attack rates)

I’m not going to comment on the math, but I would like to say that weakness is fine, and moreover we need more effects like it.

To many of this game’s active defenses are just straight damage negation which leads to extremely binary combat. We need less invulns and more partial mitigation effects like weakness and protection.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Three reasons:

1. Reaper is on the lower end of skill floor. To be completely honest, you don’t have to be that great of a player to have a decent performance as a Reaper.

[/quote]
The differences between skill floors on classes in this game in marginal at best. Outside of differences in APM requirement most of the classes in this game are fairly basic to play.
Nearly all of the skill requirements in this game come from having to read complex combat situations that have enormous amounts of interlocking mechanics and telegraphs.

3. Necros as a whole throw a monkey wrench in how people like to play. From neutering healing with poison and screwing up rotations entirely with Chill to laughing at your Stability and Protection that you were relying on. Necros force people to change their play by screwing with them. People hate being weakened in games, and Necros are the kings of debuffing (always have been, even across games).

As a random aside, I really think that stability should be a effect and not a boon. Stability is one of those things that should be consistant in order to maintain good quality of life.
Besides outside of stability, boon corrupts are not massive game changers, and typically only have marginal effects on the outcome of a fight, meanwhile a stability corrupt can often singlehandedly turn a fight around.

TheLastNobody.8319:

The reason was to help counteract the boon spam that had creeped into the game over the years. Class that rely on boons like ele and revenant of course are our natural enemies, and we can potentially not just shut them down, but turn their very prescence into a hinders be for their team.

I keep seeming people say that boon corrupt counters boon spam, but honestly I think that’s totally backwards.

Boon Corrupt is stronger against classes with moderate to low boon generation because the low amounts of boons allows me to target specific boons, and the boons that get corrupted are much harder to replace.
However against things like boonspam ele or Scrapper, boon corrupt is far less effective because the sheer quantity of boons prevents me from targeting specific boons and the boons that I do corrupt are easily replaced within seconds.

Agemnon.4608:

The problem is you need to actively take utilities or specifically trait (like a water trait that cleanses burning and chill upon dodge) to cleanse conditions whereas simply having the right weapon can apply them. As a rev I have chill on sword for example.

That argument cuts both ways. Every weapon set in the game deals power damage, yet to get power defense you have to take utilities.

The reason people complain about condi is because this game doesn’t let you have both strong power defense and strong condi defense on the same build. Given the choice between power defense and condi defense, most players tend to pick power defense over condi, which leads to a disproportionate amount of the playerbase running around with little to no condi defense.

Laserbolt.6731:

Carriers are good at making the TEAM win, that they are assigned to. They make enough of a difference somehow to erase the skill difference between the teams, even if their MMR is similar to their teammates.

…and their win rate will reflect this. Hence glicko and ELO systems being standards for most ranking systems.

The first problem with this entire thread is the idea that “carriers” even exist.
The concept of whether you’re “carrying” is entirely based on the context of the match.
A average player on a team of rabbit ranks vs some slightly less than average players is obviously going to be “carrying”
That same player on a team of proleague players is no longer “carrying” and is in fact “getting carried”

The second major issue is what being a “carrier” really means. Carriers are if you boil it down, just players who are better at winning than other players. Which means if you want to find carriers you want a system that can evaluate how good a player is at winning, which leads to the glicko and ELO systems that already exist.

Living World is a perfectly fine concept – if only the game had been designed from the outset for LW.

However GW2 wasn’t initially designed around the idea of LW which means story is extremely awkward for new players.

As someone who came in just before HoT, I thought that hearing about things like the Marionette and then accidentally stumbling on the remains of it in Lornar to be cool.

However what annoys me to no end was when I started HoT and had all these random strangers talking to my character like their my bros on top of the fact that a dragon egg that I never knew I had was stolen from me. (I’m supposed to care about this?)

The idea of Living World completely screws with personal story. You either have a game built around Personal Story, or you build the game around Living World. You can’t do both.

Barzhal.2640:

While I think what you propose would be great, I think you seriously overestimate Anet’s ability and inclination to do such a thing.

I feel confidant in saying that Anet likely already has done modeling similar to what the OP is talking about, heck Anet probably has way more advanced modeling metrics than what is outlined above.

Players seriously underestimate the amount of metrics developers have.

Also simulating player skill especially at high levels of play isn’t actually as complex as people make it out to be. Figuring out the optimal play for a given scenario is fairly straightforward. Most of player skill is actually in a person’s ability to process and react to the situation.

The problem with metrics and simulations is that they only give you the typical/average result, however the average result is not the same as the live server result.

Example: Lets say we have a hypothetical class that half of the time completely dominates their opponent, and the other half of the time gets destroyed in seconds.
Simulations and metrics would say that the class balanced since it has roughly 50/50 success.
However a competitive player would consider the class to be terrible because having a 50/50 chance to fall on your face is unacceptable for serious competition. It’s simply too risky.

I’m going to preface this by saying I actually agree that this game is worse for not having trinity and for not having more complex mechanics based ability systems.
However the OP is using some really off arguments.

nearlight.3064:

This is fine, but what do you do tactically to win that fight? You spam. You spam damage until its enough to outspam the enemy’s sustain. You spam as much sustain as you can when your enemy is spamming their damage at you.

“spam damage?” Any game that involves HP bars is about “spamming damage.” Same for sustain.

Complexity and skill come from the details of dealing damage and the details of sustain.
How do you optimize your damage against a target that will try to counter you? How do you maximize your classes defensives tools? When should I use my long cd abilities vs when should I save them?

race of sustain vs. dps.

All combat in all games with any form of mitigation or healing is about sustained vs DPS.
Killing a player requires dealing more post-mitigation DPS than their incoming HPS. This is true for every game, trinity or no.

Again complexity is in the details of the execution not the overarching mechanic.

Even though most of the bunkers are no more, it still feels the same as juggling cooldowns to survive/disengage or hold a point as long as possible instead of tactically outwitting the enemy team.

Holding a point is a tactic in and of itself since you’re stalling the enemy team.

The thing about tactics is that tactics aren’t actually complex at all.
The greatest tactics are often simple ones, both in gaming and in real life. Example Waterloo was won by the british hiding on the reverse slope of a steep hill, Cannae (regarded as one of the most brilliant military moves in history) was nothing more than putting the light infantry in the middle and heavy on flanks and hoping the romans would fall for the obvious trap.

You win and lose games by your team’s ability to execute tactics, not the tactics themselves.
Heck I would argue that overarching tactics are detrimental in non-RTS games, since ideally you want the game to be about the ability of players to react to a dynamic environment, not about predetermined stratagems.

Most of your post seems to be you abstracting everything to the extreme. This game has plenty of depth, however the depth is at the execution level and not the abstract level.

Buffalo Bruiser.3567:

Crinn.7864:

Demandred.7930:

The system is currently in disequilibrium, this will resolve itself over time. After X games, our final division placement should be an accurate reflection of our MMR. That is, most people will get lots of even matches eventually.

The problem is that X is a fairly large number (like 100 at least) and players don’t play or think in increments of 100 games, they play and think 1 game at a time.

Even though player might consciously know that their mmr and matchmaking will even out over time, that’s a poor consolation for a 500-100 game.

The crux of the issue is deciding whether you want ranked to accurately reflect skill or whether you want ranked to be enjoyable. Being fair and feeling fair are not always the same.

you say “ranked to accurately reflect skill”. all pitting high mmr teams against low mmr teams prove is that 5 good players are better than 5 bad players. do you really need a tournament for that?

Tell me, how does a computer program determine skill?

The simple fact of the matter is that it’s impossible for any system to determine skill right out of the gate, it takes dozens and dozens of matches to determine where a player’s skill is at.

Under the current system good players will invariably exit the pip range of the bad players, and the bad matchups will become rarer and rarer.

BrotherBelial.3094:

The only way a skill based system would work is if everyone had to 1v1 in the league. As 5v5 shows skill of the team, not an individual. Though you can see peoples skill to a degree, but not there true skill.

5v5 shows the sum total of the skill of the individuals. True skill is represented, it’s just not absolute.

If you actually look at big game changing plays, you’ll notice that those big plays are often executed by single individuals.

I’m reasonably certain that when you word it as “skill vs grind” almost everyone will say skill.

However in reality it’s not that black and white.

People want their achievements to be meaningful, people don’t want to share their prestige with lesser skilled players. This is why grind based systems are disliked.

However people also like to progress, people want their time and effort to be rewarded, and people really hate being told that they can’t progress farther. Skill based systems however impose brick walls that players can’t progress past, causing players to have a sense of futility.

The most likeable (not necessarily the most fair) system would be one that half grind, and half skill.

Demandred.7930:

The system is currently in disequilibrium, this will resolve itself over time. After X games, our final division placement should be an accurate reflection of our MMR. That is, most people will get lots of even matches eventually.

The problem is that X is a fairly large number (like 100 at least) and players don’t play or think in increments of 100 games, they play and think 1 game at a time.

Even though player might consciously know that their mmr and matchmaking will even out over time, that’s a poor consolation for a 500-100 game.

The crux of the issue is deciding whether you want ranked to accurately reflect skill or whether you want ranked to be enjoyable. Being fair and feeling fair are not always the same.

Tempests aren’t bunkers, they’re support. Bunker implies having mitigation and defensives. All tempest has is raw healing output + boon/aura share. Burst is your friend.

Scrappers are more of a bruiser than a bunker, and while they might have either too much survivability for their damage (or too much damage for their survivability) they certainly aren’t going to be causing any “bunker meta 2.0”

I honestly have no idea where people are getting this idea that everything needs to be able to be nuked down in seconds. This isn’t a FPS. Killing enemies should be a achievement not something that is inevitable.

NiloyBardhan.9170:

Chill should have received atleast 30-40% dmg nerf instead of a mere 15%…

People complain that Anet always overnerfs everything into uselessness.

People then complain that Anet needs to nerf harder.

gg

This can’t be serious.

zapv.8051:

The solution is to lower their innate tankiness and force them to use active defenses like most of the other classes.

The whole point of them not having active defensives is to give the class a unique playstyle.
Death Shroud is arguably one of the most dynamic defensives in the game. Far more dynamic that the binary evade/blocks that everyone else in the game runs around spamming.

Also meta necro’s aren’t tanky. Tanky implies mitigation. Meta Necros are just a HP sponge. Focus the necro and it dies quickly since it can’t replenish the HP pool as fast as it’s losing it.
There are reasons why tournament teams have never taken more than 1 necro.

While I do like developers defending and rationalizing their changes, that LoL notes was just obnoxious.

The puns where totally unnecessary and just added clutter, and much of the information they did give could have been stated more clearly with less words.

That entire wall of text basically boiled down to “we are nerfing some things that we buffed last time, and are monitoring mobility creep”

shion.2084:

well philia is love… so literally it is necro love. So its kinda clever I thought and entirely appropriate.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-philia

Regardless “necrophilia” already has a established definition.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/necrophilia

This game’s PvP community is made up entirely of lemmings. Forums and metabattle say something is OP = everyone and their mother jumps on it.

Necros are getting stacked so much now because they where a popular class (in NA at least) even when they weren’t strong. Now that they are strong it’s just nuts.

One of the nice things about unranked is since it’s not serious, people don’t feel compelled to stack the FoTM.

Hammerguard.9834:

Meanwhile the two top classes were still untouched. Anet wants faster paced meta but the first thing they nerf is damage.

Faster paced within moderation. They want fights to be dynamic, but that doesn’t mean the game has to be a nuke fest.

Pyriall.1683:

It’s simple…Deathly Chill should have lost either the movement impairing or the ability recharge portion of the condition. It shouldn’t get to take an already ridiculously strong condition AND add damage to it. Even if they nerfed it by 15%. It’s still an over budget ability.

“over budget”

There are many abilities in this game that do a multitude of things.

The only excessive thing on chill was the movement speed redux. We already have cripple.
Besides removing the CD redux of chill would make non-reaper chill nothing more than a glorified cripple.

fishball.7204:

They specifically used weasel wording and if the dev didn’t say 5v1-1-1-1-1, most people would have missed it.

Letting us know that 1% of the games are 5v1-1-1-1-1 doesn’t mean too much because most people that complain about having to fight premades consider 5v1-1-1-2/5v1-1-3 or any variations of 1-4/1-1-1-1-1 etc a problem. They specifically avoided giving out any more numbers to pretend they’re listening to the solo q complaints when in fact they made a change that basically means nothing (1%).

That’s rather unfair.

If you actually read the various premade QQ threads, you’d notice that the most common rhetoric being used is “premade vs pure solos.” The devs where responding to that.

Kayberz.5346:

Only difference now is that the league system encourages people to play the “best” builds more than the game did befor that, build diversity didnt change, the incentive to play " best" builds increased.
,
People are sheep and will gravitate towards what meta battle tells them

This.

No competitive game has more than 1 high-end viable class per role. There will always be 1 class that is better than it’s peers at a given role.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Yeah I chuckled at the patch notes. I don’t consider “bug fix”es to be “minor balance” changes.

A lot of those “bug fixes” affect balance.

For instance revenant skills no longer bypassing evades is pretty significant.

Malchior.5732:

2. Alacrity is unique to Chronomancers (I.E. only Chronos could ever really “counter” chill with a buff).

To be fair if you do the math, old 66% alacrity didn’t counter chill, it exceeded it.

hypothetical 10sec cd skill.
Affected by alacrity
10 – (10*0.66) = 3.4 sec cd
Then affected by chill
3.4 + (3.4* 0.66) = 5.644 sec cd.

However the reason alacrity was nerfed had nothing to do with chill, but was because 66% recharge redux is so hilariously strong that Chronomancers where mandatory to take for literally everything. sPvP, Raids, Dungeons, Fractals, WvW, etc.

Nova Stiker.8396:

This is exactly what I mean, you have no idea what exactly caused the come back.

What skills did they use during that key moment? How much was the damage? How much was the sustain? Was it good positioning? Was it bad positioning? What mistakes were made?

https://youtu.be/MKGDealc3eE?t=4m12s

Nitrosiili.5628:

I just thought today that could there be some kind of tutorial for new players?

I’ve never seen a tutorial in my life that is even remotely adequate for teaching any kind of PvP.

Given multiple different ways to do something, one of those ways will invariably be superior.

Balancing asynchronous classes is a impossibility.

Kicker.8203:

Kicker.8203:

7 Revs
4 Eles
4 Necro
3 Engi

they should be decapitated

By this I did not mean nerf to uselessness but they need more than a shaving since they are way out of line.

I really hope you’re not a barber if you think decapitate and shaving are synonyms.

Fluffball.8307:

Rampage = kills
Conquering = Cap points
Siege master = Repair treb
Demo expert = Treb kill
Make it rain = Treb hits
Edit: Combat Medic = rezzes

I don’t notice them anymore so I am not sure it’s up to date.

I’ve seen Conquering and Rampage, but I’ve never seen any of the others.

My understanding is that teleports aren’t actually teleports but rather insanely fast travel. (think lightspeed)

[note everything below here is speculation]
However I think I might know why Anet made it work like that:

The obvious issue with teleports is the fact that they could be used for insane amounts of terrain exploits both in sPvP and in the rest of the game. This means the devs need a way to determine where you can and can’t teleport. However going in and manually setting “no-teleport” areas for every single zone and map in the entire game would both require huge amounts of developer time and would be prone to having exploitable missed areas.

This means they would want a way to dynamically determine if a teleport is valid, to which I speculate that they might have hijacked the pet/minion/mob path planning algorithm, and just have the teleport travel along the pet path, and if the pet algorithm can’t find a path then it tells you that you can’t teleport.
[end speculation]

That’s how I think it works, or it could be completely different and I’m just spouting bullkitten.

Looks like glassy version of ye olde burn guard.