Guild Wars 2

Coolguy.8702:

Lmao, troll much? Those runes r trash unless you’re going for a might stacking build though strength runes do that better. Maybe if you were the one getting chilled and had insanely longer cds and the lower move speed with 1k dps a tick u wouldnt be calling it balanced. Also if chill gets removed it could just get applied again. End of discussion

They aren’t trash if you’re fighting chill builds.

Coolguy.8702:

Lmao, troll much? Those runes r trash unless you’re going for a might stacking build though strength runes do that better. Maybe if you were the one getting chilled and had insanely longer cds and the lower move speed with 1k dps a tick u wouldnt be calling it balanced. Also if chill gets removed it could just get applied again. End of discussion

They aren’t trash if you’re fighting chill builds.

CaptainShrimps.9143:

Crinn.7864:

You talk about skill, so tell me why can the attacker be skilled enough to account for the passives? Revenant’s passives proc at well defined points, if you can’t adjust to that maybe you aren’t as good as you think.

Right now the main problem with Revenant’s Soothing Bastion is the cooldown of 25 seconds. It essentially means you have to kill the Revenant twice within 50 seconds in order to get him down, since each Soothing Bastion proc will heal enough and buy enough time for the Revenant to disengage and fully recover.

Other passives, such as Guardian’s Hunter’s Determination, simply cannot be played around. Either your big CC gets nullified, or you proc it with a smaller CC, which gives the Guardian a bunch of free aegis. The best example of this is, a Thief doesn’t even want to use steal when fighting a Guardian because giving him a free Fragments of Faith is worse for the Thief than landing Steal benefits him. A passive trait made it always undesirable for a Thief to use his profession mechanic…

But those are case-by-case problems. That’s not passive in general. What my point is that passives in general are fine. If you have a problem with a specific class’s traits you should say so rather than throwing out blanket statements.

ReaperJr.5967:

Hardly. Seeing as you can comment this, I doubt there’s ever been an instance where you completely outplayed an enemy (revenant), and yet were unable to down him because of his passive procs saving him.

Except passives can be accounted for and played around. Heck you can play a opponents passive’s against them. (such a getting a decap on a engi by forcing his elixir S proc.)
You talk about skill, so tell me why can the attacker be skilled enough to account for the passives? Revenant’s passives proc at well defined points, if you can’t adjust to that maybe you aren’t as good as you think.

Besides Defensive passive don’t win on their own, they must be capitalized on, and played around. Bad players just get executed the moment their defensive proc ends.

Oh and if you really must know I play a necro.

50% win/loss means you’re playing at your skill level. Above 50% and it means the majority of the players you fight are below your skill level. Below 50% and you’re fighting players way better than you.

I don’t see the issue.

runeblade.7514:

ReaperJr.5967:

What? Do you know what active defenses are? Those are wholly sufficient to prevent 1 shotting. All passive procs do are to buy time for active defenses which results in chain defenses aka very high survivability by facerolling. Which are what people are complaining about.

The difference between using 3 defensive skills in a chain vs. 2 defensive skills + 1 passive proc is huge because…?

hey man pressing buttons = skill.

In seriousness when I see people complaining about “skilless passives” or about “bads getting carried by passives” I get the impression that they just lost a fight and are looking a scapegoat that doesn’t involving owning up to the fact they got bested.

There is too many exclamation points for this thread to be serious.

Malediktus.9250:

I want biweekly balance changes. There is no reason to wait for meta settle.

If the meta hasn’t settled then they have no idea what actually needs to be nerfed. Remember that it took over a month after HoT launch for the bunker meta to even begin to appear.

Besides rapid class changes is hard on us the players. I’m willing to bet most players would be extremely annoyed at having their class kittened with every week.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Whenever a “when hit below X health activate skill Y” proc happens, you get that skill added to a special proc slot, which you can then activate yourself to use the skill. You could then balance that slot however it pleases, by having various procs overwrite each other if the skill was unused, or a queue or skills to use, or not even procing if a skill is unused in the slot.

Then at least there would be some player choice in using those procs.

Doing that would make them the traits insanely powerful because the player now has direct control of them. The advantage of the “automatically active Y at X health” passives is that they always occur regardless of whether the player wants them to or not, which can be advantageous for the enemy.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Wrong. They have to let the meta settle and people enjoy playing their builds and fine tuning them. Nobody wants regular changes. 6 months is fine for an mmo

6 is a bit much. 3-4 month cycles. Anything less that 3 means the meta may not have fully settled.

Axialbloom.8109:

Oslaf Beinir.5842:

Bring a friend and stunlock the necro… it isnt so hard right?

Spontaneous Destruction spam did the same thing no? along with 2 other traits on low cooldwon. Rev also revomes boons so why not try having your boons removed too.

How do you stunlock 3-4 Necros? Because that will be the new meta.

Necros don’t stack very well with themselves, taking 3-4 necros would be suicide.

I still think people are overrating the corrupt on the third AA way too much.

The foefire lord is woefully underpowered. At the very least he needs a straight up HP increase.

Krysard.1364:

Crinn.7864:

Ya’ll do realize the corrupt boon applies conditions to the necro as well right? It’s not something the necro is going to want to spam on cd.

with traits you can spam to yourself perma bleed and nearly perma poison

They should rename it to “slit wrists”

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Crinn.7864:

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

You know we could actually play the game for 2 years while queing, right? Then that “feature” was suddenly taken away with the first feature patch that forced everyone into the HOTM.

Wasn’t that the same patch that they did megaserver? It’s probably something to do with that.

Maybe, though the change has nothing to do with megaserver. They actually gone on record to say that they changed that so that people wouldn’t get a queue pop while stuck in a long loading screen – you know because they can’t get their loading right.

That sounds like something PR cooked up, I doubt it’s the real reason they did it. Still going to go with it being something to do with megaserver.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

You know we could actually play the game for 2 years while queing, right? Then that “feature” was suddenly taken away with the first feature patch that forced everyone into the HOTM.

Wasn’t that the same patch that they did megaserver? It’s probably something to do with that.

Ya’ll do realize the corrupt boon applies conditions to the necro as well right? It’s not something the necro is going to want to spam on cd.

DeWolfe.2174:

Sigmoid.7082:

I believe they want to make things faster paced.

Here’s the thing with that, from a player perspective, there’s nothing faster than actually being in active combat. Increasing the offense to defense ratio so that we die more rapidly is in fact slowing the game down. Because there’s nothing more boring than waiting to respawn and running all the way back. Now, from the point of view of a spectator, it might appear to be speeding things up.

Not inherently. Killing a opponent often leads to a emotional high.
Modern shooter games are built on this principal since they are designed to exclusively focus on killstreaks since shooter developers figured out years ago that even if a player dies 15 times in a row, if they then go on 10 man killstreak the emotional surge of the killstreak will wipe away the negative feels from dying.

MyPuppy.8970:

Well, that’s still potentially 3 condis per aa… so i don’t really see how the new diamond skin is outrageous.

Excluding the boon corrupt, it’s only applying 3 stacks of bleed and 1 stack of poison for the full 3 attack chain. That’s not anywhere near as much condi damage as people are making it out to be.

MyPuppy.8970:

Well, i won’t mind it given Necro’s scepter aa converts one boon every attack and corrupt boons on 15s cd now.

It converts one boon at the end of the chain. So every 3 attacks.

They already announced the balance patch, good grief.

What they need to do is simply match the teams.

If one team has 4 ambers and a legendary then the other team should have 4 ambers and a legendary.

DoingDaMinimum.4530:

Nope was it 1.5 or 2.5 they buffed concealments damage where they could literally stunlock and kill..it was definitely after 1.2. that isn’t even considering 1. and 2. anything shadow/sin ability to stunlock and kill lesser skilled players before resolve.. we could argue this all day but there is a reason both of us old SWOTOR players are on this game now…mine had to do with the never ending tweaking to already OP and infinintly bunker-able classes. what was yours? oh and there was no window …catch someone with stun-break down and it was blowout time.

None of your points have anything to do with the subject of CC systems. You’re complaints are because you did solo ranked (which in swtor is 4v4 deathmatch) as a gunslinger (a class that is hardcountered by stealth classes)

GW2 even with a replica resolve system would not have any of the problems you mentioned because GW2’s ranked isn’t based around deathmatch. Additionally GW2 unlike swtor doesn’t homogenize it’s classes which means GW2 doesn’t have the linear pecking order that swtor class balance has.

fyi the 2.5 conc ops buff was followed 2 weeks later by conc ops losing the stun on Hidden strike so that conc ops now have exactly 1 hard cc.

TL;DR
swtor did some things right and some things wrong. Resolve was one thing they did right, and I think GW2 would benefit greatly from some sort of similar system to discourage mindless usage of CC.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

No complaints because competent players can kill Mesmers while Moa’d

Competent players don’t get killed by Moas

DoingDaMinimum.4530:

Swotor had a huge amount of more issues that kind of relegated the resolve system to useless in many cases.

Then please enlighten us. I played that game for 3.5 years and competed in 6 ranked seasons on top of 8v8 ranked. The post 1.4 resolve system was one of the best things in that game. And no it wasn’t useless, and at high levels of play (at least before 4.0 killed high level play) much of strategy was about maximizing CC or in the case of hardswitches juking people with resolve.
Heck after 3.0 resolve was the one dependable thing in the game because it was the only thing that wasn’t buggy.

GW2 really needs to have a resolve like system, since currently there is 0 penalty to spamming CC mindlessly. CC has no strategic value because CC is dime a minute.

Although honestly with stability in place what they could just do is simply make it so that CC skills are only CC skills instead of having CC tacked onto other skills.

In some cases entire AC’s were built around soft and hard cc with insane burst capability. which could literally kill a player before resolve filled entirely

The only time a single class could solo stunlock someone to death was concealment operatives prior to 1.2. At no point since 1.2 where classes capable of doing that.

The only way you could be killed by stunlock in swtor was with hardswitches which entailed multiple players all synchronizing their burst to land in a specific window.

Ocosh.5843:

I’m familiar with the SWTOR system, even though I’m pretty sure it did not exist during my brief time in the game. It was probably added in response to excessive cc. It could work but it’s close to dr. WoW had dr which (I think — long time ago) accrued based on cc type, and so you had to cycle different types or the target would eventually go briefly immune.

The resolve system existed since SW:TOR’s launch. However it did undergo significant changes in 1.4.

And no it’s not like WoW’s dr. SWTOR’s resolve wasn’t done by type, all CC went into the same resolve bar, however some types of CC would grant more resolve per second of CC, i.e softstuns gave less resolve per second of stun than a hardstun did.

The beauty of SW:TOR’s resolve is it created a lot of tactical decisions, especially with regards to stunbreak usage. It also promoted thinking about CC usage rather than just spamming CC.

That said GW2’s CC system is so fundamentally different from SW:TOR’s copying resolve isn’t going to be a solution, although there really should be something done about the insane amount of target control this game has.

Gewd.8125:

You can see on our team we had 2 necros and 1 engineer, hardly a full bunker team. They didn’t have one either even though my screenshot was too late to catch it.

My point had nothing to do with the presence or absence of bunkers on your team or theirs.

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

Go back to your cave, Dragonhunter as been used (and dominating) in SPVP at least since HoT launch even with the nerfs it got.

As far as I know dragon hunter was never nerfed at all.

When it comes to designing a matchmaker, it’s more of a case of picking the lesser evil.

Lordrosicky.5813:

I just played recently. Isn’t this crazily OP?

http://heroesofthestorm.wikia.com/wiki/Rewind

Check this out. Doesn’t reset elite cooldowns because that would be broken. Same on a ton of other games too.

So a moba’s “elite” is the exact same as a gw2 “elite”?

This thread is stupid. There where esl matches even before the bunker meta that had bigger discrepancies in points. Being high level doesn’t remove the possibility of blowouts. Heck real life sports tourneys often have a number of blowouts.

But whatever, I’m honestly convinced that people will complain about their pips regardless of the match. All I ever see on these board is people whining about pips 24/7.

Agemnon.4608:

Balance should always assume the best players are using the class unless they’re balancing for skill, which means they don’t intend for certain characters, heroes, or classes to be played at a high level but rather be “overpowered” to inexperienced players. Balancing for skill is also why dragonhunters have the best balancing this season.

They shouldn’t be balancing for skill since this game has a matchmaker. Plus balancing for skill doesn’t even make sense in a mmorpg because we have classes and builds, thus a new player could only take advantage if they happened to pick guardian as their first class.

WhiteRabbit.6931:

Buff to necromancers (this is worst thing I ever seen, WHY???), no nerf to scrapper, no nerf to druid/ranger (healing, op daze and op pet dmg), etc etc….

necros buffs?
Leeching bolts buff requires a dark field, none of the top necro builds have dark fields since the only things with dark fields are wells and greatsword #4. They ain’t buffing meta necro, they’re buffing the nobody ever uses these necro builds. The only other mentioned buffs where to core spec shroud, which again nobody uses.

The entire OP just sounds like somebody spewing all of their bias onto a thread with no regard to factuality.

Firebird.8324:

As it stands, necromancer counters Scrapper Rev (to a good extent) Druid, bunker Mesmer, but not tempest or teef, nerfing Tempest immunity might be the thing that pushes this back into a meta like the dhumfire meta from a few years ago, I’m not against it though, as I do main necromancer .

If necros countered scrappers, revenants, druids, and bunker mesmers they would have a guaranteed slot on every proleague team. But they don’t.

Firebird.8324:

Necromancer

We like where necromancer has been this season and have decided to try (but probably fail) to make lifestealing a thing by upping the lifesteal to just about every trait that has it and make it so lifesteal bolts work in Reaper Shroud (my be a good thing with spin to win on top of wells? Who knows). In essence, this will most likely be the next INCREDIBLY OP class because Tempest will no longer be a hard counter class to keep it in check, conditions will be ubiquitous and this class will only get better at giving them.

Spinning on wells requires using RS #4 immediately on shroud in a well, moreover comboing a well means we are not comboing RS #5’s ice field which means that any necro trying to take advantage of leeching bolts will be significantly reducing their chill application in shroud.

Also the jury is out on tempest, as everything rests on the details of new diamond skin, which we don’t have yet. I highly doubt reaper is going to dominate the meta though, it has other counters.

Marvok.1083:

http://prntscr.com/9oqgh1
This should stop. I lost a pip because a team exploited the 50% w/l ratio.A-net please do something about this because stuff like this make people incredibly frustated and that leads to abandoning the game.

You’re team couldn’t even get 1 point for a full match, and you somehow think you shouldn’t have lost a pip.

Floplag.4032:

I’m afraid i cant agree with your assertion that “meta” is an evolving state. Meta is what is the best at any given time, the names may change, the state of being the best or most effective does not.
Anything that doesnt have a natural counter, is a problem if you want balanced gameplay, and we all should cause without it skill really has no meaning if the class matters more.

But what makes a class best at a given time? Obviously anything with no counter will be meta, but a class can be meta while still having counters.
——-
Example, lets say you have classes A, B, C, D, and E. A counters B, B counters C, C counters D, D counters E, and E counters A.

Since E counters A, A cannot be meta while E is meta. Additionally B cannot be meta while A is meta.
However A and D can be meta at the same time, since A is indifferent to D and D keeps A’s counter out of the meta. meta is A, D
But A is also indifferent to C, and C counters D. Over the course of time C will replace D in the meta, leading to A and C being meta.
But if A and C are meta than nothing is stopping E, which leads to E replacing A in the meta, so the meta is now C, E.
Of course E is indifferent to B and A isn’t meta, so this paves the way for a E, B meta.

Now I’m not saying Anet executed on this perfectly, but this is the general principal the game is built on.
———-

While you are mostly correct about DH and Necro being stronger at lower MMR, I dont consider DH and MM Nec to be similar in the sense that a smart player can avoid DH traps or mitigate them, minions, not so much.

Minions have other ways of mitigation, mostly power cleave and mobility.

Floplag.4032:

The problem with the current meta is that it has no counter… or takes more than one person to counter.
I’ve played some of the meta and they have mechanics that are game changers, this is the real issue.
Revs converting damage to heals, mesmer rolling back time, tempests being basically un-downable period, and scrappers… just an awful lot of invulnerable or invisible periods of time worse than the old mesmer was. MM Necro isnt in the meta though im not sure why, i see 2-3 of those in half my matches and thats an awful lot of i can do nothing and get both dps and heals gameplay. They snuck Druid up there in the last week though im not sure i agree with that. Sure a true heal can be problematic if you cant put out enough dps but, meh.
Bunker builds are just boring… it is what it is.

None of those are issues, the beauty of having a game that gives us such flexibility in builds is that you can effectively counterbuild almost anything.

People keep assuming that “meta” is bad thing. It’s not, any game with asynchronous class design will have a meta. Meta is simply a word for the evolving state of play. Meta can change from one class to the next without the developers lifting a finger. We’ve seen this already with the rise and fall of the burst meta post HoT and the onset of the bunker meta.

MM Necro isnt in the meta though im not sure why, i see 2-3 of those in half my matches and thats an awful lot of i can do nothing and get both dps and heals gameplay.

Meta changes with skill level. MM necros and DH are actually meta in low to mid MMR ranges because both give large amounts of power for low amounts of skill. Once you get into the higher ranges of skill they become phased out by high skill/ high power builds.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

yay.

they are replacing mmr with pips instead.

which is dumb. They should have replaced pips with mmr.

Stand The Wall.6987:

I think the lower the total pool of available players, the less effective the glicko system is.

That’s true for any system really. With game design you can pretty much fix anything by throwing more players at it. Unfortunately you can’t just whisk players out of thin air.

WoW is a perfect example this. In terms of managing players, most of WoW’s systems are horrendously designed, however WoW gets away with this because it has such a huge playerbase that the problems don’t matter.

Chaith.8256:

Reapers don’t get hard countered by Scrappers – your usage of the term, ‘hard counter’, should be revoked.

No amount of Reapers will make Warriors a solution, either. Warrior keeps Warrior from being played.

I never said warriors would become meta, I simply implied they would be stronger in a reaper dominant meta.

If you have something on how Scrappers aren’t countering reaper then please tell me since all of my experience on both classes has pointed towards scrapper being easily able to out sustain a reaper as reaper lacks on the burst to bring down scrapper.

ImdA.4701:

This winstreak system is kittenty. Now, ppls will be even more motivated to play with full premade. Imagine how fast will Car Trash climb with that system. No, that’s definitely kitten. The only good things i see so far is this Amber/Diamond matchmaking stuff.

The whole point of streaks is for the top end players to progress quickly, so that they get out of noob territory quickly. They won’t want Car Crashed farming low MMR players.

People are focusing on your inclusion of reaper because it doesn’t make sense. Reapers are probably the worse class to pair with a druid because necros can’t take healing while shrouded.
Besides Revs have equal pressure to a reaper, better burst, and better mobility.

Morwath.9817:

The worst argument ever, since LoL has big enough population to allow soloQ and groupQ in oneQ and solo will still be paired vs solo and team vs team…

If what you say is true then the there is zero reason for them to have merged solo and team q.
But they did merge them, which means they had good reasons.

kdaddy.5431:

Maybe you could run a power build?

I fail to see how power vs condi has anything to do with the subject of AoE healing.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Truthfully, if you treat it properly, most condition builds can be taken on with barely any cleansing at all. This does require recognizing which are the heavy-hitting skills and avoiding those, just like with Power builds, though. Unlike with Power builds, there’s not a giant number when you get hit to say “Yeah that? That you probably should have blocked.”

Which leads to people thinking they can’t be avoided, since they never bother to learn what they should be avoiding.

This needs restating.

The other issue I think is that condis don’t show where they came from, so I think what often happens is players look at their bar and see a bunch of condis and they assume they all came from 1 guy when in reality they came from several opponents.

Cynz.9437:

Crinn.7864:

Cynz.9437:

still no soloq -_-

soloq is and will always be impractical.

There simply aren’t enough groups in the ranked queue at a given time to make teamq divisions and matchmaking work.

So lets crap on majority of players for the sake of couple teams? GREAT IDEA!

The majority of players is indifferent. And of the ones that do have a opinion only a handful of them will actually quit over it.
However the number of players that will be angered by not being able to get pops as a group………

I mean seriously league of legends got rid of the soloq / teamq split. That alone should tell you something.

Floplag.4032:

You must address the solo versus group queue disparity. All things being equal in all other regards you simply cannot expect a team of randoms not using voice comms or other coordination activities to compete against a premade team or large group on the opposing side

The new system is actually penalizing groups since it rounds everyone in the party up. The only time queuing as a group will be advantageous next season will be if every single member of the group is at the exact same skill level.

Having even the slightest difference between party members will give the group a disadvantage. Which means the most practical way to progress in season 2 will be to solo queue, since maintaining a full premade of identically skilled players is impractical.

Cynz.9437:

still no soloq -_-

soloq is and will always be impractical.

There simply aren’t enough groups in the ranked queue at a given time to make teamq divisions and matchmaking work.

ReaperJr.5967:

Except most diamond skin qq-ers are necromancer players like you who refuse to accept that you have counters and are not supposed to be able to win every 1v1.

Necros already have several hardcounters outside of tempests. Necros don’t need to have another counter.

Meanwhile tempests have no counterclass, yet at the same time tempests are shutting out any projectile heavy class, and any heavy condi class.

There is a reason the meta has been stagnant, and that’s because Tempests are holding the keys to the meta, and they ain’t letting anyone else in.

Agemnon.4608:

Does it need a nerf? I guess the only real test is having good AI controlled characters (a supercomputer beat a world champion in Chess way back in the 90’s so it can be done) that simulate playable characters put into a variety of situations: 1v1’s vs. all classes, 2v2’s, and all the way up to 5v5’s. Considering there are nine classes there are plenty of permutations to test in. If the diamond skin tempest groups way overperform relative to other comps then it should be looked into.

There are mathematical ways to model how a class performs in a combat situation. No need to develop AI. Sadly we the players don’t have the data needed to do this ourselves.

Developers gather metrics based off player behavior, but the problem here is nearly all of that is from imperfectly skilled players doing suboptimal things (earlier today.

It’s public school level stats to trim data and remove unwanted data. The devs know the difference between a bad and good player. Moreover they know better than anyone what optimal play looks like.