No balance patch. Looks like I won’t bother with the new PvP leagues.
Oh well, I took advantage of the sales on Steam, so at least I have something else to keep me occupied. =P
Balance is the SECOND issue. the first issue is CONQUEST. The game could be perfectly balanced and it’d still be a load of visual garbage on the screen because thats what playing conquest means for you to do; loiter around a circle spamming cooldowns.
Visual garbage does a successful esport not make.
I honestly would like to know why they put so much emphasis on creating Stronghold only to abandon it with high end PvP…
Because I agree that conquest emphasizes a type of PvP (dogpile on a capture point) that is very bad for the current high-speed, high-effects type mechanics that GW2 has for gameplay from a viewer perspective.
GW2 mechanics are very fun as a player, but the game type really needs to be paced and distributed better for any chance of success with an audience.
Maybe Stronghold isn’t the solution due to it’s high dependance on NPCs, but I think it’s in the right direction. Action needs to be dispersed more throughout the map and there needs to be more focus on objectives beyond just smashing an opponent and rotating between 3 spots.
Well, unless there are some serious balance changes today, I’ll probably be sticking to unranked anyways. In the 3 years I’ve been playing, this is my least favorite meta and I can’t say I enjoy any of the ‘good’ builds that actually succeed right now.
edit Patch notes came in. No balance patch. Looks like I got my answer. Either unranked or no PvP…starting to think the latter is the better option.
(edited by Dahkeus.8243)
Well, the advantage of playing warrior is that if you end up tanking your rating, you can just blame your class!
/half-kidding
warrior was balanced, but then everyone else shot past the balance point.
now, everyone else is balanced, warrior is under powered.
This is an interesting statement. I always thought thief is the only balanced class as of July patch and everything else shot way past the balance point. I have to try warrior/berserker in pvp now it seems.
I play both thief and warrior (unfortunately with current meta) and I feel the reason why they are the most balanced is they actually have to land hits to get benefits. If you miss, you’re ef’ed. Cloak and Dagger miss? You don’t get stealthed. Miss with Evis? Lose all adren (or any burst skills).
Would be interesting if Rev’s sword 3 skill failed to hit it’s initial hit, it fails to evade or cancels the skill. Reaper was updated in beta to gain more LF for AAing if I’m not mistaking? It’s a high burst shroud; let them starve themselves if they want to spam their Reaper skills. And so-on.
There was a Mesmer in PvP and I stated that the blind spam really isn’t needed due to their stealth, invulns, teles, etc. Their reply was “it fits my play-style so I like it”. I’m sure if Warrior had blind spam, people would be all ranting. People still think Healing Sig is “OP”, lawl.
Well, cloak and dagger doesn’t stealth if you miss, but that’s also part of why no one uses dagger/dagger for PvP on thief…so I guess it still upholds your point, even though you got the example wrong, lol!
Warrior is horrid in PvP, but it is in better spot than Rev in PvE… I really think the core needs some buffs to make it again viable as right now it is not, in terms of 1v1 it is doing good…. but in team fights and general spvp… Anet halp
Sorry did you just said that Warrior is in better spot in PvE than revenant? Please explain how you came up with that conclusion?
- Best might stacking in the game
- Unique buffs from banners
- Has a top end power and condi build.
In a raid, you’ll never want more than 2 heralds since the boons are just redundant after that and revenants don’t have any non-boon focused dps build that’s worth using. However, you can easily run 2 PS warriors plus some condi warriors in an ideal raid comp.
Its hard to say how much the economy is being effected by having less gold sources, but how the player feels in the streets is more important anyway.
What the OP is saying is it feels like its hard to get ahead.
Regardless one of the big points made that is accurate, is its not just whether you can make money, but how you make money.
In a video game, most people dont want menial tasks to be the main way to achieve their goals.right now, from what ive seen, menial tasks are the best way to get gold (which is required for many goals)
The plus side is they added more ways to achieve goals that involve less gold, but if you are going for something like a legendary, or ascended armor, you are generally drawn back into menial tasking to get ahead.
Or you can play the market. Neither of which is how many players prefer to play an adventure game
the game plays a lot better when you can mostly ignore the economic incentives.
There’s actually some pretty hard truth to back up what he’s saying.
Go to GW2Spidy.com and look up the value of high value black lion weapon skins that haven’t been re-released. These weapons historically trended up in value (unless they were re-released) due to scarcity and the increasing ticket cost. However, you now see the value of these weapons decreasing since about October.
Why has this happened? Decreasing demand. Players don’t have the expendable income that they used to for this kind of stuff.
Yea, in a lot of fights like Vale Guardian (if you’re on lightning circle duty), your actual DPS can easily be far off your theoretical, potential DPS. This kinda stuff hits engineers the hardest since you often don’t have an auto-attack to fill any gaps between casting abilities and being slightly off on your grenade throws can either reduce the damage they deal or completely negate it.
I’ve actually switched to running burn condi on my war largely because of this. It’s often a lot easier to keep up a solid rotation and if you get stuck at long range, you’re not punished as much. An added benefit is that I can swap between Phalanx Strength and Condi easily, depending on the group make-up.
Trinkets are pretty much free with laurels. Rings are free from fractals. You’ll need to craft a weapon if you want to be bleeding edge, but it’s not the stat difference from full ascended armor that will make or break a raid.
Full ascended (armor, weapons, trinkets) is 12.5% extra damage and the weapon by itself is a wooping near 6%. If you already have trinkets then full ascended armor is whooping 2% damage increase.
C’mon. You’ll get more out of not missing one auto attack than you will from full ascended armor.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/31wbip/ascended_vs_exotic_gear_comparison_spreedsheet
Yea, the armor difference is minimal, but you’ll need 1-4 weapons, depending on prof and build for raids.
If you plan on having a different character raid-ready (as many player will since group comp in a raid is important and the raid may not need your chronomancer today), you’ll have to multiply that.
If you want to do Fractals, you will need the full ascended armor for the agony resist.
Both are pretty awesome for warriors. Personally, I like Charr for the T3 cultural, but you do have to wrestle with a lot of clipping issues on the tail for most other armor skins.
Yea, I would say that the economy is in a pretty bad spot right now:
- Ascended gear drops less than ever.
- Dungeon farming was hit hard.
- Fractals don’t reward as much as dungeons did.
- Big gold sinks like guild halls and scribing have drained players’ savings.
- Raids have made the need for ascended armor higher than ever.
I think the worst effect of the current economy is that gearing for raids is now a heavy grind…which makes gearing for raids in GW2 feel a lot like gearing for raids in WoW.
More than likely we’ll see this come out later, but I would urge some caution for people who are gearing Viper’s:
There’s a condition cap at 100%. It’s possible to gear past this with full Viper’s depending on runes/traits/etc., so even if they did come out with Viper’s trinkets, you they aren’t necessarily an upgrade, even if Viper’s armor/weapons is an upgrade over Sinister.
The more I hear, the more I think this isn’t a game issue. SO you have a dude, just sitting around waiting, probably getting 150% participation, then his map fails meta after 8 minutes … and people seem to want to defend him because he copmplains the wait is too long? /losthope
No game should accommodate such lazy gameplay. You guys win … Anet should just mail you whatever gear you want, no work required. Have fun with Dress up Wars 2
So…do you know of some better way to run a large scale event like this more frequently? Cuz if you run this every 30 minutes, there’s no way you’ll maintain the participation needed to have any chance at success.
Not saying it doesn’t suck to wait, but unless you have any constructive feedback to do any better…
Gutted. So much for “let’s balance Warrior by making it UP because it’s so simple to play” says Nightmare even though there’s Druid, Scrapper, Dragonhunter, Reaper, Chrono, Herald, which all you do is press an evade skill or spam your reliable damage or broken team healing and point holding ability on Druid’s case. They CANNOT balance around Berserker right now because it would take too much time, even though it is something that they should have done a long time ago. Warrior was THE most balanced class in the game on June 23rd even with the 20 second rampage, but this HoT patch is just so bad.
All elite specs has something simple to play even though some of their “blueprints” are so complex.
This meta is so bad I’ll call it “deal damage and never trade hits meta” because trading hits is so kitten complex for casuals right?
Quoted for truth.
Can’t really agree with any of that. Warrior was only viable because of how strong they were in rampage form. Rampage form was a terrible crutch, which was why the class crumbled after the nerf.
Warriors = dead outside PVE
They are dead in PvE as well. Try playing a zerker spec at fractal lvl 80+ The afflicted instability makes short work of them, and their damage is pathetic.
Run condi and you’ll do awesome.
Warriors are also a best-in-slot choice for raid groups due to PS and even after you have 2 PS, a condi war on top works great.
Marauder Rifle can work well for Stronghold, but just be ready to run as soon as you see a reaper.
From a PvE perspective, warriors are stellar. PS is still a staple of good groups, even with revenants and outside of PS, condi does superb dps and it’s ranged too (well, like any high dps ranged build, dps is maximized by dipping into melee periodically).
WvW…idk…I’m guessing they’re still good front-liners…
PvP on the other hand…
Bumping with an update for anyone else still working on this:
We were able to get through after 2 guild mates joined (hooray guild mates!). I don’t know if it was the extra damage, but we were able to push past without getting bugged once they joined.
Good
1) Difficulty is great. Also really glad that there’s no easy difficulty.
2) Mechanics are really fun. Great diversity in boss fights and I like how the trash works as a sort of intro to the boss mechanics.
3) Glad to see new roles in the meta. I’m especially glad to see healing as finally a worthwhile thing in GW2 now.
Bad
1) Still too much focus on berserker/sinister meta. Out of 10 people, only 2 get to play anything outside of this for any real chance at success and some groups consolidate the healer and tank to put that down to 1.
2) Top end players aren’t challenged enough. My guild is still working on the first boss, but I’d really like to see a boss out there that gives the top end guilds a lot of trouble. I think it helps player morale overall when everyone struggles with raids, even if some players are at a higher level of difficulty on them.
3) Rewards Guilds really need to get a trophy or something for their guild hall when they kill a boss.
Sigh. Daredevil is the highest damage option in the game on goreseval. If you have the ps berserker providing might and a herald for fury, daredevil staff is strictly speaking the highest damage class to bring to the fight. Dodge staff 2 and auto chain is incredibly potent. Vault for mobility and evade as needed.
I can believe it in terms of power dps, but I doubt it would outperform condi warrior since the large hitbox is also a great benefit to that build.
I wish I could share in that moment, but after finishing the story over the past few days, the only part I remember was this mission bugging out endlessly on the last boss encounter. And this was yesterday when I finished it…over a month from release.
Becasue in NIkes build you have no way to generate fury unless you count throwing your warrior banner out. Becasue Heralds generate all the fury for the raid that is needed it’s not needed for you to bring fury.
Yea, the fury is redundant in any group with a herald or other good source of fury. The point of the trait would be the additional adrenaline in combat which sounds more useful than a precision bonus that you won’t use if you’re taking healing sig for the passive effect.
While we have this discussion going, I figured I’d toss out a question on Nike’s build (anyone who feels they know the answer to this, feel free to chime in):
Why take Signet Mastery on the condi build when Healing Sig is the only heal? My understanding on Healing Sig is that one of the best qualities of it is that you get enough passive healing to rarely ever pop it, which defeats the purpose having Signet Mastery. I mean, I totally understand if you don’t need to run banners and take Sig of Fury, but without that, wouldn’t Berserker’s Fury be the better option? Or are you just popping healing sig as part of your rotation for the precision buff?
Hands down one of the best classes in PvE. If raids don’t want you for Phalanx Strength, they’ll want you for the top end condi dps that you can do with longbow.
Been trying to get this done since last night, but I’ve been attempting Hearts and Minds with my husband and every time we end up getting a rift during the Mordremoth that won’t trigger the next phase of the fight.
We’ve tried this with many times now with the Canach + Braham combo and Braham + Caithe combo.
On Canach + Braham, the rift after Caithe buged.
On the Braham + Caithe bug, the rift after Marjory bugged.
We’re trying Canach + Caithe now…
P.s. So sad that it’s over a month since release and bugs this critical to progressing the story are present. =(
Almost a month later and the same bug is preventing me from completing the story…
The rift doesn’t close after Caithe spawns.
Charr is pretty awesome, but I would advise you to check out a charr using autoattack on rifle (while wearing a trench coat-like armor) before committing to that.
Personally, I picked Sylvari and am happy with it, but that’s largely because I like sylvari. The biggest benefit of this from a style perspective has been that the bright colors of sylvari hair/skin can look great on futuristic tech looking armor with the right dyes.
It’s also hard to go wrong with asura on engineer. =P
Most of mine was crafted, but some of the sets on my newer characters were largely made up with drops I got from Fractals…back when there was a decent drop rate for ascended gear.
I did also get a few pieces from PvP reward loot.
Comparing bolas to impairing daggers is really apples to oranges since they are for different classes…
But yea, physicals are in a rough spot. They have two big problems. One is that most of them have such low damage, as you pointed out, that there’s not much point in traiting to increase it. Rampage is the one exception and it’s really been the only reason to take the trait so far (until the nerf).
The other is that warriors rely on stances so much for any sort of sustain that there’s no room for a trait that only provides a CC. This makes them a lot like venoms to thieves in that they just don’t merit a spot on your utility skill bar when you depend on other abilities for stun breaks, dealing with condis, and handling incoming damage.
It kinda ties to the basic problem with Warriors in PvP right now: You need to dedicate too many traits and skills to just handling basic things like survival, condi cleanse, and stun breaks to have room to do anything else
So it’s no wonder that a team would rather bring an engi who can take things like Slick Shoes that will break stuns, give big in combat mobility, and provide awesome CC all with 1 utility skill slot.
What ability are you using there?
Pistol whip. It’s a big number because it’s a cumulative of every swipe that attack deals. It looks impressive, but that’s because it takes so long to complete the full animation.
This is pretty much the same thing that warriors did when the game came out. They posted screenshots of hundred blades saying “WOW LOOK AT MY DPS!”, but as impressive as one single number looks, it really means nothing for actual dps.
Looking at the OP’s suggestion I’m seeing a lot of changes to increase damage and I really don’t think that would do any good. Warriors can already bring eye-watering damage, but they can’t match the sustain and utility that other professions bring at the same time. More damage would just push the class into being a low-tier hero, similar to turrent engis of the past, dragonhunters now, and as thieves have often been (except their roaming made them good in tournaments too). Good opponents can easily shut down and avoid big damage.
So, there’s two ways to look at it and the solution may really be a hybrid of the two:
1 – Add more condi cleanse/boon support – This would be bringing back shoutbow or something like shoutbow. While this could make warriors viable, it would also reinforce the current tanky bruiser meta and would likely just compete with already well-established roles that eles and scrappers fill. Undoing some of the nerfs or just all-around buffing tactics traits could likely pull this off.
2 – Improve warrior CC – This is more in the direction of bringing back hambow or something like hambow. Personally, I’d rather see this since heavy CC feels more like a warrior role than shoutbow (always felt like a bunker guard when I played that). Additionally, it would be a more unique shutdown-focused role. Part of this would involve reducing some of the cast times and tells of CC since it’s already so easy to avoid many heavy CC warrior skills like Stomp. The other way to buff this would be to put more damage back to hammer or mace since those weapons are now such a big loss on damage to use compared to greatsword or axe.
Of course, those of us who remember how OP hambow used to be will probably realize just how tricky it would be to get it right without just swinging the pendulum back to far in the other direction.
+1 on this. The LFG is kind of a mess with all the raid LFG and I doubt raiders like digging through the open world stuff either.
Hmm, Exotic vs Ascended seems to be about a 16% drop in condi duration, which is worse than I thought it would be. 4 Nightmare and 2 Trapper does seem to offset this pretty well though.
Scratch that. I borked up the runes when I changed from ascended to exotic. The difference is less than 1%.
Question to clarify on condi duration: Is 66.66% the ideal amount of condi duration due to the 33% burning increase from King of Fires?
(edited by Dahkeus.8243)
I think condi warrior on vale guard should be using Banner of strength since I heard multiplicative buffs to the rest of your team is better than an extra CC you don’t need.
Totally agree if you don’t need the CC. However, I’m thinking about a situation where the condi team doesn’t have enough CC and what would be the best tradeoff there.
However, what do you mean “multiplicative”? Do you mean it stacks with another war running banner or are you just referencing the way the stat buff works?
Your options are Wild Blow, Stomp, and Headbutt. If you are doing VG and you are BurnZerker you should be in the green circle team. You should be running wildblow, stomp and fear me just FYI. It gives you enough utility to deal with Seekers on Green. Wildblow is really strong at breaking the bar also gives you adrenaline and knocks seekers away. If you play an assura you can use technobabble.
I think you mean red. =P
Hmm…I’d actually be curious to see what the difference is between exotic viper armor and ascended sinister.
I’m currently working on making a condi set of gear for my war and since I’ve burnt through much of my ascended material supply, I’m only making ascended viper’s weapons right now and will use exotic viper’s for the armor.
Got a question for warriors running condi in raids:
If you need to help with a break bar, what’s the best option to handle this?
I looked at the wiki and supposedly Wild Blow knocks off about 55% of a break bar, which would come at the expense of Shattering Blow. Can anyone confirm that? If that’s the case, would this be the best option? It sounds like this would be the lightest hit you could take to dps unless you just didn’t run with banners for some reason.
I’m sure people will be able to kill Vale Guardian with a build like this, even if they haven’t yet. However, just because you can achieve something with a certain build doesn’t mean that it’s the best build to use for that circumstance.
I totally understand that people hate being pidgeon-holed to meta builds, but this isn’t just some bandwagon people are jumping on because they saw some other cool people doing it. Meta builds become meta builds because they are rigorously theorycrafted and tested to be the most effective for their specific goal.
So yes, you can kill the Vale Guard and probably other bosses with a sub-optimal build, but if you do this, your group will have to work harder to make up for that. Maybe that means they just need to dodge one more red circle, maybe it means they have to deal with more wipes, maybe the difference is so small it’s negligible. No one can quantify this, but the fact still stands that if you bring the most efficient build and gear into a raid, you will maximize the likeliness of success and using anything less decreases that chance.
Whether this is an acceptable risk or not is up to the players and the members of that raid group who are affected by this.
Hammer is great. It’s only shortcoming is that base condi engi does so much more damage that pretty much any build or role you’d use hammer with, a P/P engi would do better. Condi engi is even better for tanking.
The GW1 system was a bit better. A GW1 dragon rank was extremely rare, and you could not obtain it by losing. In GW2 someone can reach dragon rank by losing every match. So rank means nothing. As far as title. Play long enough, win or lose, and you can get every title. A bit lame. Just put the yakslapper title up, its the only true title of greatness.
Well…until the leagues come out. =)
Condi build for raids here:
(discussed after the PS power build)
3 things:
1) I don’t think strength runes are worth taking over scholar runes for something like this.
2) I’m not sold that the personal dps loss of using bomb kit over elixir gun is justified for a fire field, especially considering how easily a PS war or herald could stack might.
3) Also, while this is a solid build, I don’t think this would really be worth taking over a condi engi unless you just didn’t have any condi gear and your group already has enough condi dps. Considering how expensive and time consuming it is to get vipers gear with sinister trinkets compared to just a straight zerker set, this is totally understandable.
Basically, you can just take the old meta power build (http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Power_Grenadier), replace the Tools like with Scrapper and then replace Rifle with Hammer.
However, the meta condi build will bring all the fire fields and blast finishers along with higher dps and the ability to take on the red guard in the vale fight.
(edited by Dahkeus.8243)
Don’t forget that, with Explosives, blasting your healing turret is a knockback as well.
Yar, that too. Plus the tiny bit that soft CCs do (immob, crip, blind, chill).
I tried something similar, but with a few variations, but I don’t think I’ve tried it long enough to speak much to it. Here’s the differences in the version I ran:
Axe instead of mace
Eternal Champion instead of Bloody Roar (seems to work well with Outrage)
Cleansing Ire instead of Rousing Resilience
Heightened Focus instead of Burst Mastery
Destruction of the Empowered instead of Brawler’s Recovery
Marauder Amulet
In retrospect, I guess Cleansing Ire isn’t that great with Berserker since you’re only getting 1 condi cleanse now. I also may go to Burst Mastery to try that out. However, it’s tough for me to give up marauder amulet since I’m really tied to the eye-watering damage of the build and I’d rather have vitality than toughness, even if it’s less of the stat.
I won’t say exact skill changes, but overall, here’s what I’d like to see:
- Less reliance on using up most to all utility skills for survival for any damage-oriented build
– Shorter cast times on heavy CC like Wild Blow and Stomp
GW2 has no real heavy CC bruiser for PvP and warrior could fill that role if it could survive long enough to pull it off and had a decent cast time so that it wasn’t always evaded/blocked/dodged.
So basically if you haven’t bought the expansion, just don’t play at least not in the competitive level!?
All the old classes are using the new overpowered elite specs. GW2 has truly become pay to win and this will surely (and rightfully) aggravate a lot of players.
I have already posted in another similar thread (NA Pro League meta) that Arenanet should do something about warrior’s sustain. The nerfs to warhorn/shout base heal etc + lack of trait to give +20% boon duration really don’t feel justified in this current meta. NA Pro League at least had several thieves, but neither NA or EU Pro League has any warriors.
Really? Can we drop this tired argument? It’s not kittening pay to win if what you’re paying for is pretty much the game itself. These elites are part of the expansion, not gem store upgrades.
But to get back on topic, I’m actually surprised to see this many marauder scrappers.
As long as your other red team members are at least somewhat prepared for breakbars, ft and powder keg seem to be sufficient for the split phase.
i was having trouble with exactly that but i think our group wasnt quite fully prepared for it
Yea, I think if you can’t down the red guard with powderkeg and FT alone, the problem is somewhere in the group and not your build.
I wonder, if you guys would like to have site/blog with all the stuff about competitive side of GW2? With all the builds, replays and everything in one place?
YES! I have really missed being able to find tournament builds. I don’t get much time to sit and watch tourneys and it’s been…1-2 years since I’ve seen any reliable source keep track of this (pretty much since MetaBattle), but I really liked seeing the diversity and variations in builds from tournaments, rather than just one agreed upon build that’s a generalization of what tourny builds were ran.
Morwath,
Thank you for this post. It’s clear, fact-based, and says a lot of things that should be said in a very constructive and convincing way.