Guild Wars 2

Nova Stiker.8396:

Ironically I can tell the match making is trying to work, pitting an emerald-rank warrior and a diamond tempest against rubies.

I honestly think the fact that it does emerald+diamond vs rubies is actually what makes running with a low rank lead to more wins.

From what I can tell it handles parties by simply averaging the ladder position and probably their MMR rating too, and then pitting them against a team that has that average.
The problem here is that if the two partied players have a huge difference in rating and ladder:
I’ll give a example: a Diamond and Amber duo queue.
The Diamond and Amber average to tier 3 or sapphire. The matchmaker dutifully pits them against a team of sapphires. However there is a large skill gap between diamonds and sapphires which means that the Diamond player will probably be able to 1v1 anyone on the sapphire team. Thus the sapphires need to +1 the diamond to counter him, but in doing so leave themselves +1’ed elsewhere, and even that Amber player can win a +1.

Based on anecdotal evidence I think it averages MMR too, judging by the matchups I’ve gotten in unranked when queuing with some no-so-skilled friends.

Ritt.3069:

I really hope to see the MMR system gone for the second season. How are Divisions supposed to represent your skill if we fight for pips of different value, depending on your MMR compared to others of the same Division?

I think what you meant to say is that you hope to see pips gone for the second season.

The MMR algorithm is a far more effective tool for determining player skill than pips. Your Divison should be biased on MMR cutoffs.

hotcarl.8621:

tempests are currently abusing DS, but only because they are extremely weak without it.

Classes should either have only condi defense or only power defense. No class should ever have both condi and power defense. Tempests currently have both.

As a necro player I would totally be fine with Diamond skin if tempests where weak against power classes, but they aren’t.

Nova Stiker.8396:

Tempest hard counters Reapers, while you can focus a Reaper down unlike the the Revenant and Scrapper, Reapers can condi-burst. There is no build in the game that can handle their beastly condi-burst other than Tempest.

Except Reapers are already hardcountered by Scrappers, and softcountered by warriors. Reapers are terrible at kiting and have no blocks or extra evades so they are vulnerable to any class that has access to large amounts of power damage, and/or CC.

Lets say that hypothetically they change tempest to where it’s countered by reaper. what would happen would be this:
1. Tempests gets pushed out of meta by a upsurge of reapers
2. DH becomes stronger. (no more tempest projectile hate)
3. Reaper becomes meta.
4. Scrappers and Warriors become much more desirable due to the reaper meta.
5. Reaper gets pushed out of meta by the upsurge of scrappers and warriors.
6. Scrappers and DH are now meta.
7. With reaper pushed out of meta, Tempest returns to meta.
8. DH gets pushed out of meta by Tempest’s projectile hate.
9. With tempest becoming meta again, reapers are now desirable.
10. Tempests gets pushed out of meta by a upsurge of reapers.
11. repeat ad infinium

Chaith.8256:

What’s stronger, two players who grinded legendary (who may or may not be good,) or one or two lower rated player’s ability to throw a game?

Really, it’s an extremely difficult question that the game’s matchmaking tries to answer. Clearly, based on the blowouts that happen – it can’t accurately answer that.

That’s the issue yes, but I think the fix is a lot easier than you think.

The problem with the way the current system handles parties is that it averages them and pits them against that average. In other words if a diamond and a amber queue together it pits them against a team of 5 sapphires.
The problem with doing that however is that the Diamond is likely going to individually better than any of those 5 sapphires, which means in order to counter the Diamond, those sapphires have to +1 him. However in doing so they get +1’ed elsewhere, and chances are that amber is still going to be able to win a +1.

The solution to this however is very simple, instead of averaging the members of the party, the matchmaker should instead match them. So if a legendary is duo’ing with a amber the matchmaker should pit them against a team that has a legendary and a amber.

eureeka.5368:

This thread was Obviously made for necro’s to cry. Ele is the only class that keeps reaper in check. Oh there is a counter to your condi bomb ?? boohoo lets go cry on the forums!

Reaper is already hardcountered by Scrapper and Tempests, and softcountered by Warriors and revenants.

Meanwhile Tempests are hardcountered by nothing and softcountered by nothing.

I see that the OP has hit the end of the curve.

Aktium.9506:

Rym.1469:

Buffing Terror and nerfing Deathly Chill wouldn’t make Reapers go for Curses.

That depends on how much you buff Terror. There comes a point where something is just to good to pass up, the question is, how do we get Terror and to a larger degree Curses to that something.

That’s a terrible reason lad.

Making something “too good to pass up” is asinine because it forces builds that aren’t even built around it to run it. The only builds that should run curses are the builds that are build around curses, and Chill builds shouldn’t be forced to take curses just because some guy on the forums decided terror needs to mandatory.

From patch notes:
Bug Fixes:
•Chronomancer—Continuum Shift: Fixed an issue that prevented this ability from destroying the continuum rift when the ability expired naturally.
•Druid—Ancestral Grace: Fixed a bug that allowed this skill to blast finish multiple times in a single casting.

They didn’t “bork” CS, they fixed it.

Browrain.7346:

Like other people have stated, DH will never be meta until tempest gets looked at. Tempest just hard-counters it too much.

Pretty much this. Chronobunkers and Tempest have too much blocks, evades, and projectile hate to allow DH to be meta.
[shameless plug]
That said if Tempests where to lose say Diamond skin, they’d be weak to reaper, which would bring reaper into meta, which in turn would bring DH into meta since DH is good against necros.
[/shameless plug]

Floplag.4032:

EVERYTHING cant be OP, im sorry it doesnt work that way.

Aren’t you the same Floplag from the SW:TOR forums that used to complain about how every class other than your main was OP?

It’ll come around.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Condi reaper is quite bunkerish in my honest opinion.
Marauder Scrapper can be called a bunker considering the Marauder amulet.
DH can block and invul for quite a while.
Not really familiar with Revenant. I never felt like playing a broken class.

Thieves have evades for days
Warriors have tons of HP and toughness with invulns.

See why this kind of logic is bad? What is defined as tanky is relative to the current meta. None of those specs you (or I) listed is “tanky” in the current meta.

Phaeston.3956:

I just finished a match where one teammember disconnected even before the game started. Apart from the waste of time the remainder of the match became, i was baffeled when i also got the treat of losing a pip. Dear Anet, how do you think this punishment is acceptable?

if you didn’t lose a pip then teams would just have a designated disconnectors whos job would be to “disconnect” whenever the matchup looks unfavorable.

i.e have the guy disconnect from every match against meta teams, and only play out matches against teams with thieves and warriors.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Hold on a minute guys, we’re still waiting to see how this meta is going to pan out.
~Anet.

Well lets see, the first thing people jumped on after HoT launched was druids. Then a few weeks later everyone was complaining about Dragonhunters, and then a few weeks later it was reapers, and then a few weeks later it’s revenants, and a while after that it was chronobunker, and nowadays it’s tempests.

Jimmy.1476:

I dont understant why there is not small balance patch every 2 weeks? I dont mean only bug fixes, but small balance changes like a little increase/decrease damage,cd,cast times,cc durations on some skills.I think it will be better and not so much gamebreakeing like only 1 big balance patch every 3 months.

Because game balance isn’t just throwing darts at a dart board. Balance decisions can only be made once they have a large body of evidence obtained from long term monitoring of the live game. Games are balanced from metrics, and accurate metrics require time.

Throwing out rebalances rapidly would result in a ton of kneejerk changes that would likely make the game worse.

Supreme.3164:

Have been saying that for months now, it’s fine to take out diamond skin out , but currently it’s here for a reason and the reason being : excessive condition overload with nothing but extreme condi removal as a definitive solution…not enough

Eles have enough condi clear already outside of diamond skin. Of course most eles don’t bother because they have DS, but that’s another matter.

Justine.6351:

Necro could get a GM trait that whenever they remove a boon, they place a debuff on said foe that next time a boon is applied to them they have ~1k health stolen. Wouldn’t deni boons but would sure make it painful.

No, outside of voicechat (most) players would not be able to keep track of what teammates have the debuff which would result in a lot of people getting killed by their own team. It would just make solo queuing extremely painful.

Ya’ll realize that removing downstate would make running bunkers mandatory right?
Downstate is what allows glassy builds to exist.

Agemnon.4608:

The cancer is the mechanics allow for the meta in the first place, not Metabattle itself.

Meta will always exist.

This whole notion that it’s somehow possible for all classes to be meta at the same time is a total misunderstanding of what a meta is.

There will always be a meta as long as builds have different strengths and weaknesses. i.e as long as classes are different. If one build becomes common then builds that are weak to it get pushed out of meta, however at the same time builds that are strong against that first build get pushed into meta.
Explanation

Random Matchmaking cannot work in gw2. There is too large of a difference in power between the skill ceiling and the skill floor. You’d get proleage/near proleague players coming into matches against rabbits, and the farming that would result would not be fun for either the top player or the scrub.

This isn’t CoD or Dice’s Battlefront. This game isn’t designed around mixing high and low level players.

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

online.1278:

Aren’t anet getting tired from their so many attempts to be esports game but result is always :

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/215497/EEEESPPUUUUURTZ.png

Well hope they get tired of implementing esports stuffs, and stop opening any kinda further more tournament anymore.

It is just my personal hope. i just don’t like esports. And that is why i play mmo instead of moba.

I really don’t understand the toon town thing.
Like, wow. A semi-popular person (with a following developed from previous streams not related to the game), did a steam with toontown in it.

Isn’t the fact that runescape has 6000+ viewers nearly 24/7, in comparison to GW2, much more pathetic?

Oh, wait. It isn’t.
Because by that logic, super mario is worse than Runescape, and who the hell is dumb enough to argue that?

This.

Now if SW:TOR, ESO, and Wildstar where putting up much larger numbers 24/7 then we would have cause for concern because those games are actually in the same genre.

Toontown is a entirely different genre covering a entirely different market. It would be like trying to compare WoW to Minecraft.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Amulets are much more than just stat combos. Well, stats are more than just stats, really. Different stats through amulets offer different playstyles and therefore different team roles.

No matter what class you’re on if you use celestial amulet you’re gonna be a hybrid, a bruiser/bunkerish playstyle.

You have it backwards. You’re saying that amulets determine build playstyle. Which is wrong. Build playstyle determines what amulet it used. Amulets don’t determine anything, they just augment the build.

You’re complaining that eles only have one playstyle, but that isn’t because of cele.

PowerBottom.5796:

what is a DS tempest?

A tempest that has fallen to the dark side.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Crinn.7864:

Amulets are just stat combos, they aren’t classes, they don’t all need to be viable. Celestial isn’t ‘OP’ it just synergizes well with how elementalist works, that’s not a bad thing.

The bad thing is that it’s the ONLY amulet elementalists can run. No other amulet works for them, not even marauder and certainly none of the condition ones.

…and?

It’s a stat combo. That’s all amulets are. Elementalists just use one particular stat combo.

I don’t see the issue here.

sinject.4607:

Crinn.7864:

sinject.4607:

First of all, that’s not true. In the current meta there are maybe two builds total capable of “nuking” anything and both of them (power shatter chrono & trap DH) have already been pushed out of the meta long ago. Tempest, Scrapper, Herald, Druid, and bunker Chrono are completely incapable of being taken down by a single burst or even multiple from a single player thanks to the slew of passive defenses each has.
.

Trap DH was never pushed out of mid/low MMR meta. It was only pushed out of the proleague meta.
Chrono was never in the mid/low MMR meta, because mid/low MMR players can never capitalize on alacrity, and invulns are only helpful if you know what to use them against.

so what? who cares about low tier players? since when is it ok to foster an environment only conducive to the lowest common denominator’s enjoyment in a competitive setting?

you know what’s also strong in low tier? condition thief.

low mmr relevancy means literally nothing.

stop trying to baby-proof sPvP.

I’m not “baby-proofing” sPvP, I’m pointing out why certain mechanics exist.

Games that punish the casuals always end up dead. Every single time.

Besides I really don’t understand why players hate the autoproc @ health% abilities. They are consistent and are not RNG and because of this can be played around.

sinject.4607:

First of all, that’s not true. In the current meta there are maybe two builds total capable of “nuking” anything and both of them (power shatter chrono & trap DH) have already been pushed out of the meta long ago. Tempest, Scrapper, Herald, Druid, and bunker Chrono are completely incapable of being taken down by a single burst or even multiple from a single player thanks to the slew of passive defenses each has.
.

Trap DH was never pushed out of mid/low MMR meta. It was only pushed out of the proleague meta.
Chrono was never in the mid/low MMR meta, because mid/low MMR players can never capitalize on alacrity, and invulns are only helpful if you know what to use them against.

Reikou.7068:

Eh, as long as matchmaking and MMR are working correctly, eventually those average players would be matched with and against other average players.

That’s not the issue. the issue is that it takes far less skill to blow someone up that it does to defend against getting blown up. If we didn’t have passive defensives, most of the low and mid MMR matches would just devolve into nuke fests.

Velimere.7685:

Did I miss the part where ArenaNet said players can’t have multiple accounts?

You realize that enforcing that rule is nearly impossible right? It’s technologically impossible to tell if a new account is a legitimate new account or a alt account.

Amulets are just stat combos, they aren’t classes, they don’t all need to be viable. Celestial isn’t ‘OP’ it just synergizes well with how elementalist works, that’s not a bad thing.

Lytro.9305:

I’m just wondering since Anet said they wanted to shake the meta with their next update, and since they are pushing for esports, would it be beneficial for every class to be in the meta? I think it would allow for more entertaining gameplay and maybe a little more build diversity. Would something like this be possible or is it something that may never be achieved?

No, it’s not possible. ‘meta’ is just the evolving state of play. Meta will always exist in any game where the classes are asynchronous, due to how one classes interact with each other.

example: Necros are weak against anything with large amounts of CC, so if CC heavy classes are meta, then necro gets pushed out of meta. Conversely classes that are vulnerable to boonstips and condi tend to get pushed out of meta if necros become meta.

Here is a good video explaining this better.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Same for me as Monica. Are the ‘easy in sapphire’ guys perhaps a dragon hunter or reaper? Those profs, stacked seem to win 70% of time (i’m often matched against them).

Stacked reaper sucks if you hit any team with DS tempests or large amounts of condi clear.

Floplag.4032:

The point of any match making system it to create balanced fair matches as much as possible, not shorter queues. If that was the goal there would be no system and just dump all into one giant queue and group them without regard for any statistics.

Except that’s not how it works. Queue time is a priority because long queues will kitten off players far more than bad matches. People will usually get over a bad match the moment they are in another one.

A 10 minute game isn’t worth 2 hours in queue.

StickerHappy.8052:

Crinn.7864:

ITheNormalPerson.9275:

or they could just nerf the elite specs to be more in line with standard specs, to prevent this power creep in the first place.

With a couple exceptions the elite specs themselves aren’t more powerful. What makes them almost mandatory is that you need to slot the elite spec to get the improved class mechanic, and the ability to slot the new weapon type and utility skills.

Example: The DH traitline doesn’t offer much over core builds, but guardians all run it for the improved virtues, LB, and traps.

As I have said this would be the lazy way to do it, the core specs need help, not the elite specs.

If we ever manage to bring them up to par with elite specs, it will be better for build diversity AND very good time to address the VERY OLD issues the core specs have.

Core specs don’t need help, they are on par with elite specs.

Elite specs are taken for the abilities and new weapon pick. Not the traitline. (some exceptions)

muscarine.5136:

So yea, letting hardcounters be a thing is the worst offender toward diversity imho.
And this trend started way before HoT.

Hardcounters don’t limit diversity, hardcounters are a product of diversity.

By giving us the players so many build choices they give us the ability to create builds that specifically play on another build’s weaknesses. The only way they could possibly stop that would be to severely cut down on our ability to customize builds.

ITheNormalPerson.9275:

or they could just nerf the elite specs to be more in line with standard specs, to prevent this power creep in the first place.

With a couple exceptions the elite specs themselves aren’t more powerful. What makes them almost mandatory is that you need to slot the elite spec to get the improved class mechanic, and the ability to slot the new weapon type and utility skills.

Example: The DH traitline doesn’t offer much over core builds, but guardians all run it for the improved virtues, LB, and traps.

Silverkey.2078:

I am no expert in computing stuff for video games, so I do not know the TTK equations. So I do not pretend my suggestion is better, it is just the only suggestion I had in mind to do this. Yes mine are based on an “infinite fight” idea, and do not take into account the number of HP, but I still think they are very intuitive.

TTK is fairly simple. it’s TTK = HPS*MaxHealth / DTPS. Where DTPS is damage taken after mitigation.
I bring up MaxHealth because it’s hugely important.
Example: A hypothetical class could do 15k HPS with 70% block/invuln uptime, but if said class only has 1k health, it’ll die faster than a thief. Conversely a class with 30k health but no blocks/invuln and 0 HPS will take much longer to kill.

The sustain index 1 is simply how much damage (assuming constant damage per second and after taking into account armor/mitigation for power damage or condition cleanse/resistance for condi damage) you need to deal to equate the healing of the build.

Out of this x damage, only a small percent will actually hit, for example only 42% if you fight a chronomancer. So the actual damage received per second is on average 0.42*x. When this damage equals the healing, you have
0.42x = HPS = 815 for chrono => x = 815/0.42 = 1941 (which comes to 1923 without the rounding errors).

I gathered as much. So for the purpose of this, you’re simply assuming they are chaining blocks/invuln on CD?

The second index is not as clear, but it is trying to also take into account damage mitigation and armor, so it represents the weapon strength*coefficient/second you need to deal assuming you have 2200 power and no crits. It is a less intuitive measure but still works well to compare different builds.

coefficients vary from ability to ability and so do cast times. Just calc to the DPS and let people figure out if they can hit that number.

Silverkey.2078:

I am no expert in computing stuff for video games, so I do not know the TTK equations. So I do not pretend my suggestion is better, it is just the only suggestion I had in mind to do this. Yes mine are based on an “infinite fight” idea, and do not take into account the number of HP, but I still think they are very intuitive.

TTK is fairly simple. it’s TTK = HPS*MaxHealth / DTPS. Where DTPS is damage taken after mitigation.
I bring up MaxHealth because it’s hugely important.
Example: A hypothetical class could do 15k HPS with 70% block/invuln uptime, but if said class only has 1k health, it’ll die faster than a thief. Conversely a class with 30k health but no blocks/invuln and 0 HPS will take much longer to kill.

The sustain index 1 is simply how much damage (assuming constant damage per second and after taking into account armor/mitigation for power damage or condition cleanse/resistance for condi damage) you need to deal to equate the healing of the build.

Out of this x damage, only a small percent will actually hit, for example only 42% if you fight a chronomancer. So the actual damage received per second is on average 0.42*x. When this damage equals the healing, you have
0.42x = HPS = 815 for chrono => x = 815/0.42 = 1941 (which comes to 1923 without the rounding errors).

I gathered as much. So for the purpose of this, you’re simply assuming they are chaining blocks/invuln on CD?

The second index is not as clear, but it is trying to also take into account damage mitigation and armor, so it represents the weapon strength*coefficient/second you need to deal assuming you have 2200 power and no crits. It is a less intuitive measure but still works well to compare different builds.

coefficients vary from ability to ability and so do cast times. Just calc to the DPS and let people figure out if they can hit that number.

Silverkey.2078:

I am no expert in computing stuff for video games, so I do not know the TTK equations. So I do not pretend my suggestion is better, it is just the only suggestion I had in mind to do this. Yes mine are based on an “infinite fight” idea, and do not take into account the number of HP, but I still think they are very intuitive.

TTK is fairly simple. it’s TTK = HPS*MaxHealth / DTPS. Where DTPS is damage taken after mitigation.
I bring up MaxHealth because it’s hugely important.
Example: A hypothetical class could do 15k HPS with 70% block/invuln uptime, but if said class only has 1k health, it’ll die faster than a thief. Conversely a class with 30k health but no blocks/invuln and 0 HPS will take much longer to kill.

The sustain index 1 is simply how much damage (assuming constant damage per second and after taking into account armor/mitigation for power damage or condition cleanse/resistance for condi damage) you need to deal to equate the healing of the build.

Out of this x damage, only a small percent will actually hit, for example only 42% if you fight a chronomancer. So the actual damage received per second is on average 0.42*x. When this damage equals the healing, you have
0.42x = HPS = 815 for chrono => x = 815/0.42 = 1941 (which comes to 1923 without the rounding errors).

I gathered as much. So for the purpose of this, you’re simply assuming they are chaining blocks/invuln on CD?

The second index is not as clear, but it is trying to also take into account damage mitigation and armor, so it represents the weapon strength*coefficient/second you need to deal assuming you have 2200 power and no crits. It is a less intuitive measure but still works well to compare different builds.

coefficients vary from ability to ability and so do cast times. Just calc to the DPS and let people figure out if they can hit that number.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

This formula is a nice black box model. It basically says, I don’t care what is inside, but I want the values at the ports. Typical Electrical engineering analysis.
While it may not include everything, it is a nice basis of what is going on in a fight.
Regardless of the TTK model, if HPS > DPS we can follow trends.

But I’m not sure that it’s even remotely correct. I can’t for the life of me understand what this index mean. I can understand from his description what he was trying to do, but I don’t think his formulas actually accomplish his goal.

If all you want is a basis, the simplest (yet accurate) method would be to just come up with a arbitrary ballpark estimate of DPS in a teamfight with a ballpark estimate of the ratio of condi to power, and simply use that in a standard TTK equation.

Silverkey.2078:

The sustain index 1 that I am computing is supposed to represent the amount of sustained damage the enemy team has to put up to overcome the sustained healing of the build. The sustained index 2 is trying to take into account armor and protection+damage reduction, so it represents the amount of power damage you need (while index 1 is valid for condition damage). I excluded all skills which would prevent point capping (therefore mimicking the build trying to fight on point). I also assume that the enemy has not unblockable/unavoidable skills. This is a very gross estimate, based on value/cooldown and not on a rotation, but it does give an idea.
Formula:
sustain index 1 = healing per second / (1 – evade/block uptime)
sustain index 2 = sustain index 1 * damage mitigation * armor/2200

So I sat down and parsed out what you did. And well..

You’re doing it wrong.

You stated that your goal was to determine how much sustain damage (per second?) is required to kill a target.
The obvious answer to that question would be to use the TTK equation, but instead of doing that you removed all the variables from the TTK equation except for HPS and DTPS, and then tried to break the DTPS variable into opponent’s DPS and the class being measured mitigation (block/invuln)
Removing everything but enemy DPS, mitigation, and HPS means that the equation is only valid for a infinite length fight, and moreover it means that your equation will basically just spit out how much pre-mitigation DPS is required to equal the HPS Which isn’t even remotely practical because in a real match you only have so much time to clear a node.

A better approach would to just be to come up with a estimate of power and condi DPS for a typical teamfight, and run that against the various forms of mitigation to come up with a DTPS number and plug that into the TTK equation.

Salamander.2504:

Crinn.7864:

ZeftheWicked.3076:

There is a semi-invulni panic button for the reaper – spectral armor. A smart reaper will pop that right before shroud to gethimself some solid survivability uptime. If his overall defense is strong and enemy’s burst comes in multiple hits rather then one big one it may ineed seem reaper pushed 0 damage button. Well except he didn’t and it won’t work well against condi spam.

Shroud disables the LF gain from spectral armor, which means popping it going into shroud just gives the reaper the prot buff for the first ~6 seconds of shroud. That’s not even remotely a semi-invuln.

All reapers are defensively is a giant HP sponge. Shroud is essentially a second health bar, albeit one that heals itself via LF gain rather than standard heals.

Bolded section is false—SA works in shroud and is a great way to secure near-invuln to power damage for the first 6 seconds of shroud.

Alright I tested it myself, I was wrong. (seriously Anet, incorrect tooltips)

It’s still not a invuln. LF gain is healing, which is a reactive defense. Invulns are proactive.

Sheobix.8796:

This.

You can’t blindly try to calculate heals per second, mitigated damage per second and state that a class needs nerfing. While they do need nerfing, this is not the reason nor the direction it needs.

Well you can, just not the way the OP did it. When I played swtor, the theorycrafters there had come up with a way to mathematically model the effects of heals and various defensive cooldowns on a combat situation, granted that game has combat logging (Anet pls) so they had more data to work with.
And now that I’m thinking aobut it, I’m gonna see if I can find a thread detailing how they did that.

Avius.7698:

This more or less i a normal day in ranked. mostly necro/reapers. ppl prefer them cause they are durable and deals a lot of dmg.

A DH complaining about reapers?

Do you not realize how absolutely brutal DH are to reapers since reapers lack the evades and blocks to handle traps and True Shot?

Besides seeing lots of necros in a match is meaningless.. Necros have always been popular even when they where weak.

Alekt.5803:

Yeah, but it does not mean Mallyx Revenants need a buff. It’s the condition part of Necromancers and Reapers that need to be looked at. I am looking at the scepter that was recently buffed for instance. Scepter means conditions sent without a projectile or clear animations I must say. Not many classes can manage those conditions. And, I am all for changing Diamond Skin to something more interesting.

Just because scepter applies conditions doesn’t mean the enemy needs to have a clear for every single one. Scepter #3 is the only major threat on scepter as the other two just apply moderate amounts of bleeding which is by far the weakest condi in the game.
I don’t know about you but I rarely if ever bother wasting a condi clear on bleed.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

There is a semi-invulni panic button for the reaper – spectral armor. A smart reaper will pop that right before shroud to gethimself some solid survivability uptime. If his overall defense is strong and enemy’s burst comes in multiple hits rather then one big one it may ineed seem reaper pushed 0 damage button. Well except he didn’t and it won’t work well against condi spam.

Shroud disables the LF gain from spectral armor, which means popping it going into shroud just gives the reaper the prot buff for the first ~6 seconds of shroud. That’s not even remotely a semi-invuln.

All reapers are defensively is a giant HP sponge. Shroud is essentially a second health bar, albeit one that heals itself via LF gain rather than standard heals.

Silverkey.2078:

Hi all

I did have some fun trying to compute a value of the sustain for a few new meta builds:

• chronobunker (before and after the last patch) (http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Chronomancer_-_Alacrity_Bunker)
• condi rev (http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Herald_-_Condition_Mallyx)

and for comparison, old meta builds:

• power warrior (http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Warrior_-_GS/Hammer)
• bunker guardian (http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Guardian_-_Bunker)

The sustain index 1 that I am computing is supposed to represent the amount of sustained damage the enemy team has to put up to overcome the sustained healing of the build. The sustained index 2 is trying to take into account armor and protection+damage reduction, so it represents the amount of power damage you need (while index 1 is valid for condition damage). I excluded all skills which would prevent point capping (therefore mimicking the build trying to fight on point). I also assume that the enemy has not unblockable/unavoidable skills. This is a very gross estimate, based on value/cooldown and not on a rotation, but it does give an idea.
Formula:
sustain index 1 = healing per second / (1 – evade/block uptime)
sustain index 2 = sustain index 1 * damage mitigation * armor/2200

You should be able to come up with a ratio of condition damage to power damage a build is subjected to and use that to come up with a much better sustain index. You could do this by simply tracking end of match damage values in a excel spreadsheet, or the math way of taking popular meta comps and computing their condition damage and power damage outputs.

They could do what SW:TOR does, and simply have a /chair emote that creates a appropriately sized chair to sit on.

Jekkt.6045:

Crinn.7864:

Jekkt.6045:

it’s still around in gw1. if it was deemed unhealthy it would have been nerfed dead, like many other builds before. and it’s also not a cheap gimmick but a very effective build with pros and cons.

Oh please, Guild Wars 1 is practically in maintenance mode. Take off those Harry Potter sized rose tinted glasses of yours.

fact is, gw1 is more balanced than gw2 and has shorter queue times. i don’t need harry potter glasses to see that.

I see how this thread works.
It’s just another “it was better in the old days” threads written by people suffering from dangerous amounts of cognitive bias.
When I played SWTOR we had the SWG fanboys always talking about how SWG did it better, here in GW2 we just have the GW1 fanboys.

If GW1 was so good, it would still be healthy. But it’s not, it’s nothing but a dying husk.

Jekkt.6045:

it’s still around in gw1. if it was deemed unhealthy it would have been nerfed dead, like many other builds before. and it’s also not a cheap gimmick but a very effective build with pros and cons.

Oh please, Guild Wars 1 is practically in maintenance mode. Take off those Harry Potter sized rose tinted glasses of yours.

Jekkt.6045:

that’s why i said enoug, not too much. one such a counter would for example be kiting. in gw1 a bomber had to get in melee ranger (hence why they took shadowstep) a necro in gw2 obviously can’t take shadowstep.. so you could immob the necro in order to prevent him from coming to you, or stun. your team on the other hand could cleanse you or give you stability. that’s what counterplay is.

If there is any counterplay, a bomber is worthless. Killing downed is easier than rezzing. Which means any self-sacrifice build must be able to guarantee a kill as otherwise it’ll just be giving free kills to the enemy team in higher levels of play.

Jekkt.6045:

it would certainly be possible if anet wanted to. afaik robert gee was even a gw1 balance dev so he might remember the stuff.

Has it not occurred to you that there is perhaps a reason the devs decided not to bring bombers back in GW2?

Self-sacrifice builds will either be useless or a cheap gimmick. Period.