Guild Wars 2

Trigr.6481:

Well on the bright side bunker mesmer is now a thing Also I’m kinda disappointed that nobody responded to my post on the first page. I guess because nobody had a decent argument towards it, shame. Oh well happy Halloween everyone

Countless

Nearly all of the arguments seem to be
“Abjured is self interested and controls Anet” or on the opposite side “Abjured doesn’t like bunkers therefore bunkers are bad cuz abjured”

Like does anyone actually understand the issue, or is this just a Abjured thread?

sephiroth.4217:

Try the Boon duration Amulet, with Durability or Leadership runes.

If you can’t be an effective support with those 2 items then the problem is further into your traits/sigil synergy with your playstyle.

support isn’t the issue. The problem is that bunkers don’t have the survivability to back the support since they go down if they so much as tapped by a cc. Which with the abundance of cc brought by HoT……

Chaith.8256:

I think the pure Support role should be better supported in PvP. That can be done through better ways than increasing personal survivability (1vX) of Supports/Bunkers, which is the definition of Minstrel Amulet.

Except survivability is the only kind of support that is useful in a PvP environ. All PvP -even conquest- can be boiled down to killing the other team faster than they kill you, after all dead people can’t cap nodes. Because of this fact the only thing remotely useful outside of raw DPS is going to be survivability.

Yes, you could do support roles that are not based around increasing team survivability. But there would be 0 reasons to ever take such a support class over a DPS role of some type.

MrKrataus.6420:

The only counter play to ministrel druid was moa, the only counterplay to moa(or double moa) was svanir rune, now svanir rune is gone moa have no counter play, moa is aids, moa isn’t life. pls remove it and give them triple more damage on gravity well idc

Druid problem not a minstrel problem.

VaLee.5102:

Guys please stop derailing the topic…
This is not a topic about whether you like the content or not or whether you are a pro or a noob.

It doesn’t matter how bad a player is, if he won’t buy the expansion or any of the future expansions then that’s an opportunity lost for ANet.

The point of this whole topic is that an expansion should have a balance in order to catter for all kind of players to maximize profits and population, and HoT currently doesn’t. And this impacts all of us on the long run.
At least that’s my opinion.

Problem: What some player types like directly conflicts with what other player types like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxpW2ltDNow

Harper.4173:

There is very, very little content in the new expansion – and it forces you to stretch it out even more to make it appear as if there was more content.

Compare the amount of content in HoT to the full game – remember you paid full price for both.

Now leave aside the map size – some might argue the new maps are more content rich – concentrate on the other things.

HoT brings fewer new skins, fewer events, fewer instances, fewer story instances, fewer new enemies, fewer mechanics – fewer everything than the core game did on release.
I wouldn’t even be upset if they at least did 60-80% of what we had on Core release – but this is absurd.

And no – core Tyria masteries are not content – they are features – you can’t take old content and present it as new.

I’ve never seen a MMO expac have as much content as the original core game did. You realize they literally spend years developing the core game right?

HoT has more than enough content to warrant the title of “expac.” Also note that expac size vary by game.

I’ve never noticed issues with GTleaps going downhill. However if there is the slightest bit of uphill slope……

Many elite specs are stronger than the core class, but this is to be expected this recent after a expac. I’ve never seen a MMO to date pull off a expac without having egregious balance for a time afterwards.
This is due to difficulty in predicting how completely new mechanics will affect the meta.

Give it a couple patches and it’ll be much better.

incisorr.9502:

im not talking about asians im talking about me playing asian mmos for over 10 years now because they look better, feel better, have much better and more impactful animations and are way more balanced in general

gw2 does look good for a western mmorpg (compared to some kitten like wow) but the balance/animations/impact are horrible

“impactful animations” is a hugely subjective opinion. heck, Game Balance can arguably be subjective..

This game is very well balanced. How do you know? Because in the first two pages of this forum I can find a thread complaining about how pretty much every class bar warriors is overpowered.

incisorr.9502:

korean mmos are way better than western ones

No they aren’t. Asians just don’t whine about everything, because Asians are more likely to blame themselves for a failure rather than blaming a scapegoat, due to how their culture works.
.

Maybe because they want to decrease the amount of gold in circulation?
No really, that’s a good thing.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

The strongest comp will be whatever the winning team plays. So let’s wait and see what abjured plays going foward.

No the comp that the winning team plays is the strongest comp of the comps played in that particular tourney. There is still potential for there to be better comps out there.

meow one twenty.4376:

Maybe not so much “informed,” and “infallible,” but more, “during testing (practice), this combination was better than that.”

Do you really think that they managed to thoroughly test everything in the small amount of time since expac?

I’ve been PvP’ing in various games long enough to make the observation that what players/teams think is optimal immediately after expac rarely ends up being optimal in the long run.

meow one twenty.4376:

These people are playing for prizes, they will use what they think gives them the best chance to win.

But the real question is: Are they correct? They are certainly the most informed players, but most informed does not mean infallible.
I bring this up because there has been so little time passed since the HoT launched. Sure there was the betas, but those where incomplete and lacked the new runes and amulets, plus stuff was changed between them.

It’s simply too early for anyone to be to definitively claim they know what’s the strongest comp and class, since there simply hasn’t been enough time for the meta to settle.

Scambug.3502:

I agree Skyhammer (knockback builds OP) and Courtyard (teamfight builds OP)

While I believe Courtyard is plagued due to this game’s combat system not being favorable to TDM, I honestly think having maps like Skyhammer that value a completely different type of build than typical maps is a good thing.

Why? Because having maps that force different playstyles open the meta up. By limiting ranked to a small number of generic conquest maps it limits the meta to only whatever works in generic conquest.

If they put in a large number of maps that each favor different build setups and then limited the ability to change comp once a queue has popped it would actually introduce a whole new level of strategic play. A team could make a comp purpose built for a certain map style, but would risk not getting that map. Or they could try to make comps that are good across all maps, but could risk going against team built for a certain map type on the map that is that team’s strength.

SW:TOR did this back when that game had 8v8 objective ranked, each of that game’s map had different ideal comps, add in random map selection and it lead to a state where there was never a real consensus on optimal comp, and it was rare to have multiple teams running the same comp. There where conventions of course, but it was nothing like GW2 where we have “thou shalt run this build with this comp”

What I mean, is on runes like the Rune of Durability (PvP) the 2pc bonus is +5% boon duration and the 6pc bonus is +15% boon duration. Does this come out as baseDuration*120% or is it (baseDuration*105%)*115% ?

mazut.4296:

Made an experiment and went back as bunker guard. Much harder to stay alive.

Try using Minstrel’s Amulet with Rune of Durability on that Bunker guard, it’ll fix that survivability problem, and that’s even with concentration being bugged.

SlayerSixx.5763:

….. where you launch allies from the treb.

Anet implement this ASAP.

I’m more concerned about all the bouncing lockboxes in the LA vaults.

ZenMa.3976:

OTHER CLASSES ARE MORE BETTER HELP TO TEAM WIN.

Your English teacher should feel ashamed.

ZenMa.3976:

oh, Thief threatens to your survival? cuz thief in stealth, can’t expect attack when and where from, right? So where u standing now? OF COURSE ON POINT ZONE. U RUN OUT THE CLOCK ON CAPTURE POINT ZONE AND U STILL GETTING THE SCORE WHILE THIEF ROAM AROUND U WITHOUT GETTING ANY SCORE POINTS.
SPvP = point zone capture to win.
HOLD POINT ZONE IS THE WIN GAME.

I would assume the thief would then go off and slow down some other player so that other player cannot reinforce a node. Also if somebody is sitting a node looking for a thief they are not elsewhere doing something more productive.

Leagues are exactly why soloq won’t return. It is unlikely that there are enough premades in queue at a given time to keep the teamq popping for all leagues. And that’s without the difficulty of what to do with players who want to run premades of less than 5 players.

Everything works better with largers numbers of players. Hence splitting up your playerbase is something that developers will tend to avoid at all costs.

I stopped reading at “this game is horribly unbalanced”

This forum can’t even make up it’s mind as to what’s OP. Every thread I’ve seen so far about X class being OP, has just as many people shooting down the notion as uplifting it.
Looking at the class forums every single one has is full of people talking about how every other class has it better.

Protip: players will never believe a game is balanced. Humans by nature always try to find the optimal way, which in gaming means that players will always find some way to declare one class better than another. The fact that perceived class imbalance also makes a good scapegoat for why one lost contributes too.

Elegie.3620:

• The current meta is a bad joke. A metagame implies that the builds it contains counter one another in a circular way (A >B > C > A), but in GW2’s case, the only thing that counters a celestial class… is a celestial class..

I’m going to randomly drop in and nitpick that the definition of “meta” in regards to PvP simply refers to a state of play or strategy that evolves over time, and in no way actually requires a set A>B>C>A. Usually I see A>B>C>A balance referred to as RPS balancing. (rock paper scissors balancing)

Please no CC runes.

ronpierce.2760:

I just wish shears were a bit better. I feel like they only have one purpose, to keep bushes in check… Beyond that, they’re practically outclassed in every way by the lawnmower, basically low reward for the effort required to use them.

They’re easy to be mobile and counter one thing and somehow that keeps them a spot in the toolbox, but any slight change to the mower or weedwhacker would push shears right out of the box and you’d probably never see them again. Which makes me sad because shears were my first tool…. :/

Anyone else get this feeling?

pfft, shears don’t belong in the toolbox anyways because hedge trimmers are superior. Of course both hedge trimmers and shears are both worthless if the bush is running a bunker build with the Thick Branches traitline.

Exedore.6320:

OP’s post fails as soon as he said Courtyard was good.

People hate Courtyard because 5v5 deathmatch is a mess. Stronghold is disliked because it feels a little too much like PvE (or at least did initially) and lacks a strong comeback mechanic.

That dislike has nothing to do with the lack of build templates.

To be fair the real issue with courtyard is less of the “mess” part and more of the a problem with the fact that the entire combt system in GW2 isn’t favorable to TDM. Specifically TDM just tends to promote mass AoE spam, and the AoE spam tends to lead to the exclusion of melee builds. This is further made worse by the narrowness of the courtyard.

Usse.2795:

Lose the argument in Logic, resort to personal attacks over the internet. You the man.

He never lost the Logic argument because you never used a logic argument. (granted neither did he)

Your first post is nothing but a anecdote, moreover it’s a anecdote with no context. I could get 1v3’ed by three axe/axe warriors, and post a pic of the death log with all the axe damage and have the same validity as your first post.

Your second post is even worse because you tried cast anyone disagreeing with as “defending cheese” however not only is that base mudslinging, it’s not even good mudslinging because it requires the audience to indisputably agree that burning is cheese, which given the number of detractors in this thread, certainly is not a given.

In my experience this game isn’t as bad as most of the other games I’ve played. (console PvP anyone?) That said I’m fairly new here and only ever queue unranked and I would imagine that ranked is probably worse.

However I have noticed that when I do encounter toxicity here, it’s usually extremely bad and extremely concentrated.
I had a match yesterday where in the match prestart two players on my team decided I must be the worst scrub ever because I was running sword/shield on my bunker guardian instead of the Metabattle standard, and because my gear “looked like a something a s****er wears.” They then proceeded to give me crap the entire match, and then when we won decided I got carried hard because they managed to get more points than my bunker did.
Granted they may not have realized I was a bunker since I might have accidentally forgotten to rez/buff/peel for them during the match.

Outside of that regrettable match, I haven’t seen much toxicity at all other than a few people getting salty in /say over getting +1’ed.

Starfall.6425:

Crinn.7864:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Left to grow grass consumes rock- think entangle. However, this buffs rock in teamplay vs lawnmower as it grants free stealth access.

1 rock + 4 grass ESL god comp.

Wouldn’t a mobile +1-rock, a bunker lawnmower, signet tsunami and two cele grasses be better?

Rocks have terrible mobility and are too easy to rotate around them. It’s better to use rocks as a bunker in teamfights. Lawnmowers are much better for mobility. However since grass can grow anywhere it’s usually better to take another grass rather than a mower for the decap and +1 spot.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Left to grow grass consumes rock- think entangle. However, this buffs rock in teamplay vs lawnmower as it grants free stealth access.

1 rock + 4 grass ESL god comp.

Morfedel.4165:

Guys, you do know that trees is the new elite specialization for grass, right? And paper is the elite skill for treats, and we have recently discovered that paper always beats rock so grass with trees equals an op set up. It needs to be nerfed.

yes but the lawnmower’s elite specialization is chainsaw which always beats tree.

Well the MMR is certainly not consistant, either that or my guardian is totally immune to the matchmaker.

Scott.7163:

Don’t add anything new, just nerf them and make them crit. Condition/precision/ferocity stats go.

Just a random thought from my programmer’s mind: It may not be possible to make them crit depending on how “stacks intensity” is implemented.

Condi of the same type allways stack regardless of source. Which again depending on how the game engine does stacks begs the question of when you have condi stacks from different players, which player’s precision do you use?

Now I haven’t played this game very long, but I’ve had more than enough experience with PvP theory crafting from other games to realize that Conditions in this game are far from OP and are honestly rather underpowered.

Condis are by nature have double counters, compared to direct damage attacks that are only single counter. What I mean by this is that condi’s can first be countered by the target simply dodging/blocking the attack that applies the condi, but can also be countered by cleanses. Direct damage attacks can only be countered by dodge/block.
Oh, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Necromancers exist.

The other thing with condi is that sPvP is (excluding courtyard) purely objective based, which means that decreasing the time required to wipe the enemy and cap is of the utmost importance. This means that the only condi that are going to be useful are going to be bursty condi. Which is literally burning and burning only.

On the subject of burning, I really don’t get why it’s hated so much. It’s barely more bursty than other direct burst sources, but at the cost of being backloaded. I see people talking about how OP burn guardians are, but is that because burn is too strong, or is it because it’s burn + the rest of the guardian package is too strong?

Labjax.2465:

sephiroth.4217:

Labjax.2465:

When I’m on the losing side, I can’t get through 200 points without seeing someone on my team leave. When I’m on the winning side, I can’t get through 200 points without a “team unbalanced” prompt. Are you kidding me?

From this I will assume you join custom hotjoin matches, nothing wrong with that either but it’s just a hotjoin. People come and go through those matches just trying to get dailies done, some quick kills or warm up or what ever..

If you don’t want that, join unranked or ranked ques, there’s still afks from time to time but atleast it’s a 5v5 locked into the team and game until there’s a winner.

Where do I start with unranked tho? I got no idea what I’m doing. I mean, I’m passable at 1v1 if I’m facing somebody as nubbish as me, but I got no idea how to do team PvP in this game, other than hitting buttons that seem right and praying.

I’m the kinda guy who doesn’t want to go into a semi-serious match, unless I can be reasonably good at contributing.

Why wouldn’t you be doing unranked? It’s called UNranked for a reason -it’s not serious. Yeah obviously people still want to win, but you’re never going to be able to PvP if you’re too afraid of offending someone.

And really the fact that you realize that you’re underskilled puts you ahead of a lot of players.

fyi the point of the matchmaker isn’t to make you win, saying “my w/l rate went down” is not a valid supporting argument for the matchmaker is broken.

That said I do think there is a issue, but it’s not a issue with the amount of losses, but rather the fact that losses always come in large streaks.

We as players invest ourselves in the game, losing a match is a direct hit to our self image, (rather we realize it or not) losing leads to a negative game experience. This is normal and wouldn’t be so bad if losing was regularly broken up by the “high” that comes with winning.
Unfortunately the current MM likes it’s streaks and losing match after match leads to a punishing experience rather than a entertaining one.

I think that if Anet is determined to keep the enforce 50% W/L part of the MM, they need to at the very least have a conditional that after so many consecutive losses, the MM must place that player in a favorable match regardless of how high that player’s W/L ratio is.

Although really, I don’t understand why the MM is trying to enforce a 50% W/L in the first place, since it really doesn’t make any sense from a competitive standpoint.
Honestly the MM should prioritize having matches where teams are of equal average skill, and then (if possible) try to make matches where there isn’t any overly large differences in skill between individual players.

Vieux P.1238:

The Alpha numbers & reviews already proven it. I’m interested in it even if it’s f2p i would actually sink a few bucks if they do us right. It’s already an Esport game inthe asian market. So imagine how long it will take to be in NA.

Being a E-sport in the Asian market (or really anything to do with performance in Asian markets) is largely meaningless with regards to how well it will perform on western markets, simply due to the massive cultural divide between Asia and Europe/NA.

A big example of this divide is the fact that western markets tend to revile pay2win monetization schemes. In Asian markets, pay2win is considered totally reasonable. They tend to be totally chill with grinding, and I’m talking extreme grinding that would be the death of any western game.

Another thing about Asian markets and E-sports is that over there they tend to be super competitive about everything. Compare that to EU/NA where the competitive portion of the market is very small, with the vast bulk of consumers being extremely casual.

This post reminds me of all those old threads about how Wildstar was going to kill off PvP. Except then Wildstar launched.

All games are amazing, perfect, and super innovative up until they have the misfortune of actually launching.

GW2’s combat system can totally support a ctf map.

Concerns about certain abilities being OP in the gametype can easily be rectified by simply doing what SW:TOR’s Huttball does, where using certain abilities while carrying the ball - namely teleports, stealth, and Force Barrier* - cause the ball to be reset at it’s starting position at mid. This actually adds a level of skill too since there are times where resetting the ball is beneficial vs trying to keep it.
*Barrier being that game’s only true invuln skill.

Anet plz

double post because I apparently can’t edit my own posts.

Loki

I thought i was going mad today, or atleast my pc was dying, had this 3 times, twice where my wasd would not respond, mid battle, and another where my character was running around horizontally

I can confirm having the WSAD freeze. However it’s not PvP, it’s the game in general. I’ve had it occur everywhere from the Silverwastes, to Lion’s Arch, and even while doing the level 1 intro story quest.

My guess is there is some input pattern that is causing a hiccup, and it takes several seconds for the client (or server depending on how movement is handled) to sort itself out.

This thread is absurd. In order for someone to shut down your keyboard they would need to have admin rights to your computer. Or in other words they would have to remotely break through your computer’s security (without setting off anything that would alert you that your security is compromised) and then write themselves a admin account.

And that’s the least of the hurtles. To even be able to target your computer for such a attack they would have to be able to find it. Which would be quite a feat considering that individual game clients don’t communicate to each other at all, but rather they only connect to the ArenaNet’s game servers.
So in order to get at your computer they would first have to hack into ArenaNet’s servers, rummage around in the servers (which is a challenge in itself because having access to data is not the same as being able to read it.) until they find the connection to your PC, and only then could they begin the process of breaking into your PC.

Oh, and they would need to do all of that in the ~1 minute before the match starts.

The worst “hack” I have ever seen done in gaming was a year ago in SW:TOR, where a pair of players lauched DDoS attacks against a couple other players. However they where extremely limited in that they could only launch attacks on players who had visited their Mumble Voip channel. (most Voip programs allow server/channel admins to view user IP addresses, the reasoning being so that admins can IP ban users if needed.)

I want gear that at least pretends to be practical. I want to look like a person, I do not want to look like a escapee from a Dr. Suess novel.

oh and gear for females that looks like the male sneaktheif set.

Rauderi.8706:

GW2’s combat experience can’t be filtered into a simple number. I wouldn’t be against a DPS meter, but conceptually, the way damage gets done in this game in particular defies normal conventions.

But, players are going to use DPS meters improperly, assuming that the single number off the meter is completely their own damage, when it comes as a result of the entire team’s combined effort. Might, Fury, Vulnerability, defensives and aggro management.. It doesn’t belong as a number.

A flat DPS number wouldn’t be accurate. But with nothing more than a combat log it becomes straightforward enough to develop ways to determine the effects of raid buffs vs self-buffs on DPS, and come up with fairly accurate models.

Yes there will be ignorant thickheads that try to use flat DPS numbers as the end-all-be-all, but you’re better off avoiding those people anyways.

Kaligos.7285:

Well, I neither want Recount nor something like Gearscore to be part of my raiding experience anymore. It was horrible in WoW, besides being mandatory for monitoring the DPS in raids. DPS-nitpickers are last thing I want to see in Guild Wars 2.

DPS elitism will never be as bad as it is in WoW. The reason WoW is so bad is because of the sheer size of it’s population. There are soo many players in WoW that you can have ridiculous requirements and still easily find enough players to fill a raid group. That’s not a luxury that the rest of the market has.

In my time in SWTOR (which has DPS meters) I didn’t see any DPS elitism. I did see a lot of bragging by DDs about their DPS.
Now that said when I did progession in that game we did have cutoff DPS requirements, which was calculated by dividing the boss’s HP by the enrage timer and then dividing by the number of DDs to get the bare minimum DPS required to beat the enrage timer. That was exclusive to progression though.

I just want a combat log printed to file. There are many useful things you can do with combat logs that don’t even have anything to do with meters.

I don’t like the reduction in transmutation charges. But what’s with the Tome’s of Knowledge hate? Some of us actually level things.

There should just be a toggle in the game options that sets all finishers from other players to the default finisher.

SlayerSixx.5763:

Uh, because thieves would insta end the match….? Portal with mesmer? Why even fight on spirit watch? Turn it into a race mode and create a linear track with obstacles and shielded spawn points. Make it like CTF, but keep the objective in the center.

One word: Huttball

hharry.1967:

It is even hearth breaking that they are adding something similar to arenas in PVE and not PVP.

Good, arenas are terrible, and have created nightmarish balance problems in pretty much every PvP game they got implemented in, in addition to having some of the most simplistic and stagnated metas possible.

I don’t think the lord should heal, but I do think the NPC guards (both the lord guards and the inner/outer gate guards) should respawn after a period of time.