Yup. These are all-around good changes. Arguably, this should have been the way things were designed from the start, but regardless, it’s nice to see alts as being more viable now.
Thank A-Net troll buff is a + and makes skipping more dangerous. + 1 for put more skill requirements in PVE.
Yea, it was a bit sloppy to have it drop the wrong tokens, but path 1 is a lot more fun with this troll.
Honestly, I don’t see how this affects rangers. There’s 1 decent build for sPvP (Spirit Ranger), 1 decent build for PvE (Sw/W Spotter/Spirit), and arguably, no great build for WvW.
Until rangers get more viable builds, I don’t think this really matters. =P
It would be awesome if GW2 took a page from FFXIV ARR’s book and allowed some emotes to be combined, such as /sit and /wave.
I think some people are having reading comprehension issues here…
No one is saying that dodging should be irrelevant. Dodging at the right time should be integral to success.
However, that shouldn’t be the only defense you need to succeed.
You know you ~can~ just go play WoW, instead of turning GW2 into WoW, yes? Action combat is the point. 10 man action combat could be interesting, but these suggestions about unavoidable damage are contrary to the heart of the game.
Is this a troll?
WoW’s a gear-grind extravaganza. Just because people enjoy large group, instanced content doesn’t mean they like to grind all day to be able to do it or like having their friends locked out of their group because they aren’t in the same gear tier.
And how is unavoidable damage contrary to the ‘heart of the game’? Do you believe that having all healing and support traits/builds/gear being irrelevant is being true to the ‘heart of the game’?
Well, I don’t think it’s just about having a bunch of enemies doing low damage. Too much of that and everyone just runs an AoE spam build. There also need to be single enemies with a high speed, low damage attack or a DoT effect to keep up pressure.
Ideally you have this sort of low, steady damage and mix it with spike damage because too much of one without the other just makes for a stale, imbalanced meta.
I don’t want to see this unless they can make positioning more important than just having 10 people stack. It would play exactly the same as a 5-man team except you’d have more damage and the enemies would have more health.
GW1 discouraged people being near each other by having devastating AoE. Even in normal wilderness, things like djinn and roaring ethers would instagib your entire party of 8 if you were all clumped together.
^ Excellent point.
I also think they would need to add in more steady damage. The reason for this is that currently much of the damage comes in spikes, so it can just be dodged, leaving almost no need for any sort of support role. With steady, constant low damage, players would need to utilize more diverse strategy than simply stacking DPS boosting builds and dodging damage.
So, here’s a question (purely for discussion):
If you had to choose one, would you prefer RANKED Solo Arena, or UNRANKED Team Arena? I’d imagine unranked team arena would still allow you to queue up by yourself or with 1-4 friends much like the rated version does now.
Thoughts?
I would choose unranked team arena. I’ve always found one of the biggest shortfalls with GW2 PvP is that I can’t simply queue up for some PvP games with my partner unless we either do serious, ranked games or worse, step into hotjoin where we’ll likely just get ‘autobalanced’ onto separate teams.
They could make a killing off of selling new emotes on the gem store.
Missed opportunity. =/
Chase’s guide on GuildWars2Guru.com is still the most comprehensive guide for PvE thief builds. It hasn’t been changed in a while, but it’s still all up to date.
some one call for ze Doctor? (shameless warcraft3 reference) oh man im so gonna be the healer! i can’t wait!!!!
Don’t get too excited yet. They’ll need to do more than lower berzerker DPS to make healers viable.
I totally support this idea. I know ArenaNet is trying to foster an environment that is accessible to players with busy schedules, but I think that they could make 10-player, instanced content available without having it become the giant time hog that it has been in other games. The biggest reason for this is that there isn’t a huge gear treadmill and the need to farm long hours to get necessary consumables.
I have been playing now in solo arena for a bit and find it very grrr at time, but today I was at 91% on the leaderboard and then lose 3 games in a row and now dropped down to 87%.
How on earth do you get into the leaderboard when you have to rely on other players and their skills?
Also what about the 4 v 5 games when you get players who give up at the start and don’t wish to try?Is there anyway to get there with your own skills and game play or is this just a game of chance, in which you hope you get a good team that knows how to play?
Yes, you will hit 4 v 5s or just get bad teams from time to time, but everyone does. Play enough games and this averages out, so just make the most of what you have.
Here’s what I have found to work:
1) Communicate – Deciding who is going where at the start helps, but you also should try to shout out incomings or where teammates are needed. Because of the downed/rally system, fights heavily influenced based on who has the most teammates present. If your team is wasting time running to the wrong place, your team will be outnumbered in team fights, which puts them at a very big disadvantage.
This doesn’t mean just shouting out orders. This also means listening. Sometimes the best course of action is to help out a mediocre strategy that someone else proposes instead of wasting a bunch of time arguing for a better strategy.
2) Focus on the objectives – Don’t get caught up fighting on roads or spending a ton of time fighting a bunker on a node they control (unless you can knock them off the point and decap it).
3) Play a strong build and play it well – There are some builds that are particularly strong in carrying teams in solo queue, such as bunkers and decap engis. Builds that work well independently are generally more reliable in solo queue since you can’t always rely on your team sticking together for team fights.
For example, I switched from a meditation DPS build on my Guard to a bunker build because the team utility and extra cleave for team fights was often wasted, whereas, I could still stand my ground and decap points with knockbacks when playing as a bunker.
Just realize that if you have an awesome build for your team in tPvP, it may not shine the same way in solo queue and vice/versa.
4) Play a decent number of games – Some people get a good lucky streak when they start doing solo queue and soar up the leaderboard since, unfortunately, there is a relatively low quota of games that need to be played to move up. However, playing a good number of games will still move you up and will also make you a better player by giving you more experience. Rating also decays if you don’t play for a while, which is even more reason to play regularly.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
I would have an X% chance to fire a second arrow (using the auto attack stats/damage) per attack (so multiple chances w rapid fire). Would NOT work on barrage.
% chance could be 15%
I would be ok with this. I think the bottom line is that there needs to be more than just a projectile speed increase to be worthwhile over the other Marks options.
The last logged in feature, as small as it is, is a really great change.
It’s not a guild hall, but I’ll take it.
Also, the WvW lfg changes definitely have some good potential.
Also – why is this in spvp forum and not the ele forum?
Answer: This could affect the sPvP meta.
@ OP: I could definitely see something like this becoming a strong option. There’s definitely some value in something like this for team fights. I’m just glad that the FGS teleport is getting nerfed.
I’ll keep this short.
Proposal: Add a small boost of damage to Read the Wind (I think 5% is fair).
Why make this change: The new Read the Wind trait has a lot of potential, but because the longbow is already a rather low DPS weapon and has many good competing traits in the Marks tree, I believe this new trait will need to do a bit more than just increase projectile speed.
Possible balance concerns: The biggest concern with adding a strait damage increase to a trait like this is, of course, the power creep. However, I think that the opportunity cost of taking this trait is enough of an offset to prevent this from becoming an issue. In other words, if you take this trait, you lose the potential benefit of traits that would otherwise give an equal or greater increase to DPS.
Please feel free to share your (constructive) thoughts. =)
A new race/class would be nice, but I would rather see:
– Guild Halls
– New gameplay mode for sPvP
Because thieves don’t have the access to other ways of surviving that other professions have.
/thread
=P
I gotta admit…the over-abundance of abbreviations in this subject name made me laugh out loud a bit.
Fixing condition stacking in PvE would probably do a whole hell of a lot more to break up the zerker meta than nerfing zerker would.
Eh…D/D can be fun since it you can make a big difference in performance by knowing the timing of your stealths (i.e. staring a CnD while stealthed and having it land as stealth ends to chain into Backstab instead of just backstabbing from stealth).
However, D/P is still often a lot more diverse in gameplay and is overall more powerful (at least in sPvP).
Err, what are you talking about? 30Acro is more favorable than 30SA to a backstab build. Only trolls goes 30SA because with that much points into SA, you’re damage output suffers.
Wait, what? Are telling me that putting 30 in SA hurts my damage output, but putting 30 in Acro doesn’t? What game are you playing?
Please first explain how 30 in Acro hurts your damage output, as oppose to improving it, and I’ll explain how 30 in SA does hurt your damage output.
Fair enough?
Since when was a SA backstab build viable?
At least in WvW, SA is decent for stealthing to escape zergs and makes D/D viable with blind on stealth.
In sPvP, 10/30/0/0/30 is king for any backstab (D/P) build because it’s only second to 25/30/0/0/15 in terms of damage and brings amazing utility (boon strip, vigor, and a stun that goes through stability).
I saw nothing in that preview that would have any impact on:
Warrior dominance
Thief dominance
Decap Engie dominanceExcept, perhaps, to increase it.
Warrior
Healing sig and pin down nerfs are decent changes to tone down wars.Thief
I’m surprised we didn’t hear anything on pistol whip, but there’s a lot of defensive options opening up for other classes that will counter thieves to some extent.Engi
Personally, I think that the strength of decap engis is predominantly the fault of having only conquest maps. I mean, it’s a class that continuously drops AoEs the size of a capture node and has tons of knockbacks. Put an engi in an open field, however, and it’s a much more balanced fight.
It doesn’t look like there’s much to address decap right now except for giving them the option to get quickness when they knock you back, lol.The problem is that the developers think warriors are fine, but they are not. I don’t want to get into an argument about it here. However, every profession needs to bring a strength and a weakness to a team, and it needs to be designed such that stacking that profession (i.e. 2x, 3x, etc) far increases the weakness to that team than it does the strengths. This is not the case with warriors.
Thieves are the only burst class that works in the meta, and the only one that can reliably (albeit it’s challenging) drop a HS warrior. This leaves Mesmers and elementalists out of the picture entirely.
Decap engies – well, that’s a truly cancerous build. It’s absolutely gutted solo queue. The fact no one has talked about hotfixing that speaks volumes regarding the development team.
Heal sig and pin down will tone down warriors and toning down warriors will allow more classes to go toe-to-toe with them, which addresses the thief issue as you outlined at the same time.
Will it be enough? That depends a lot on how these other changes all work together, but it’s at least in the right direction.
Evan,
Is there any way to simply make the mouse cursor more visible? Maybe a check box in the options that makes it larger/a brighter color/glow? My biggest issue targetting comes from when I want to click someone or somewhere and not being able to find my mouse because the brown blends in with the background.
This could be an awesome elite, especially if it worked as a smoke combo field.
I think you’re a little over-the-top with condi cleansing in this build, rofl.
You have 4 conditions taken away every 10 seconds, 2 removed on use of Lightning Reflexes (32 seconds), 2 removed on Sharpening Stone (36 seconds) and 2 removed when your enemy hits 75% hp (36 second cd).
Oh and poison and blind removed on dodge, lmao.
I think this shows how much condi removal rangers will have access to, but it’s really just too much focus on condi removal to be viable unless something changes the meta to be even more condi-focused than it was when necros were at their prime.
If pet responsiveness becomes what they say it will be, then I expect this will be particularly good for using a raven pet. Ravens are already good pets, but the delay and over-the-top attack animations often prevent attacks from landing and keep the blind on F2 from really being that reliable as a defense.
I definitely think that a ‘beta’-like atmosphere simply because the meta is such a fickle thing that takes so long to really outline what is OP and what isn’t.
For example: So many people thought Diamond Skin would be wildly OP, but 3 months later, it’s a pretty forgotten trait.
There’s a lot of factors that go into play before areas of improvement can really be identified that I think we really need to have a longer, larger-scale testing environment for changes that affect balance.
Yea, I really hate to make comparisons about skills/weapons/traits between professions since it’s usually an apples-to-oranges type scenario, but it’s hard to not realize that the longbow is a much, much weaker version of the mesmer greatsword.
Mesmer Greatsword
Without talents, this weapon can:
– Pierce targets
– Hit targets instantly
and it brings very similar skills to the longbow (knockback and AoE cripple,)
If you pick up Piercing Arrows along with the new talent, you almost have the mesmer GS, but you will still be vulnerable to projectile reflect and will still probably miss some attacks due to the projectile travel time.
Meditation guards are fine. The only downside of a meditation guardian is that a bunker guard is usually better.
However, you can blame that on a system where Conquest is the only game mode. If sPvP wasn’t all about stacking on a small area and surviving the AoE/knockbacks, then bunkers wouldn’t be what they are now.
Hmm…isn’t distortion more useful when your enemy is alive? =P
At least it’s not 8 vs 8…
Pros
– At least there’s an option to conquest?
– Map looks decent enough in terms of design for what it is.
Cons
– Since this is for custom arena only, we’re still pretty much left with Conquest as the only real sPvP option for gameplay.
– There’s really very little room for any sort of strategic gameplay when there’s no objective outside of a straight deathmatch.
– This probably means that we’re not going to get the sort of multi-objective, non-conquest based game mode that is really needed to break up the current PvP meta.
Predictions
– This will turn into a zerg-fest where people ball up and spam abilities with little to no strategy involved.
No…just no. Team Deathmatch is good for people that just want to jump in a bit and score some kills to let off some steam, but if they’re going to release a new mode, it needs to be something that encourages strategy and skill, not the ability to zerg and stack for kills.
If the devs need to see what kind of maps would make for good, diverse, strategic gameplay, then they should take a look at the stuff from HoH and GvG in GW1.
I saw nothing in that preview that would have any impact on:
Warrior dominance
Thief dominance
Decap Engie dominanceExcept, perhaps, to increase it.
Warrior
Healing sig and pin down nerfs are decent changes to tone down wars.
Thief
I’m surprised we didn’t hear anything on pistol whip, but there’s a lot of defensive options opening up for other classes that will counter thieves to some extent.
Engi
Personally, I think that the strength of decap engis is predominantly the fault of having only conquest maps. I mean, it’s a class that continuously drops AoEs the size of a capture node and has tons of knockbacks. Put an engi in an open field, however, and it’s a much more balanced fight.
It doesn’t look like there’s much to address decap right now except for giving them the option to get quickness when they knock you back, lol.
I don’t think that people will go berserker with defensive traits. I think people will just continue to go berserker with offensive traits, lol.
Some of the new traits look interesting to some extent, but I doubt they will shake things up much since they all still require a 30 point investment and need to be better than existing traits to have a chance.
Why they decided to add more grandmaster traits instead of just adding more utility skills or elite skills, I have no idea.
Honestly, after watching the stream, i might just be done with my guardian. The trait changes we got are not going to change any builds, and once again we got zero quality of life changes because we are “in a good place”
You’ve been playing Guardian for too long. Spend some time on another class for a while and you’ll see why Guardians are being left alone for the most part.
The changes mostly seem to be potential buffs for bunker guardians or front line guardians in WvW. They don’t seem to really revolutionize anything, but not many of the traits for other professions did anyways.
I’ll use the DA trait on my thief for PvE, but I probably won’t use the rest anywhere for any reason.
I’ll also probably not even use the DA trait much in PvE since I almost never bring my thief into dungeons anymore. There’s almost no reason to ever take him over my guardian outside of for my own amusement.
Steal will not work when an enemy is behind an object.
Full notes here:
http://dulfy.net/2014/03/21/gw2-ready-up-episode-8-developer-livestream/
There were some interesting changes…but unless there’s another map in the works or another game mode coming, it’s really disappointing to hear that the only option for something other than Conquest of WvW will be something for custom arenas only and is just a pure deathmatch map.
The game modes and map design in GW1 was really masterful, but it seems like the multi-objective design has really gotten left behind.
Marks Trait – Useful in WvW. Until there’s a map that’s not conquest, it’s useless in sPvP since DPSing from range is rather useless if you’re not standing on a capture point. Useless in PvE.
Skirmishing Trait – I see no situation where this is really viable. It’s a bunker trait in a DPS line. Meta DPS PvEers won’t take this and PvPers will take MoC.
WS Trait – Not sure what to think of this one…poison is pretty weak as a dps condi, even on a condi build, but it’s an interesting option.
Nature Trait – It’s awesome to see some active condi removal…but not sure what builds will take this.
BM Trait – Could be useful for a bunker build?
Anyone else find this at least slightly creepy? lol
“Shhhhh! Marjory, don’t worry, I just want your faccccceeeeee…..” ~deranged glare~
From the looks of it the only balance changes will be…
I stopped reading there.
Seriously people, this is a preview, not a comprehensive list of all changes.
I’m cool with it. It will be interesting to see where Celestial gear sits after some of the more math-savy members of the community analyze the changes thoroughly.
It’ll take more than these changes to move the dungeon group culture away from the ‘zerker-only’ mentality though.
I actually enjoyed PvP a lot. Especially when i played with guildies and friends. Sure the balance isn’t perfect but so is other popular esport like Dota or LoL. Plus you can always reroll to another class.
If anything I wished Anet adds more game modes soon like deathmatch or something like that. Playing the same game mode for more than one year does get a bit tiring xD.
Am I really the minority when I actually enjoyed PvP?
The minority on the forums? Maybe. The minority in the game? Nah.
Also, I’m with you on this opinion.
Because of the nature of solo Q, there is a high degree of variation in success as a result of 4 v 5s and such. Because of this, it can be hard to tell where you stand after only a handful of games. However, once you play a lot of games, this starts to even out.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a rather low threshold of games played for people to move up on the leaderboards. They really should have something in place so that you have to play at least 100 games or something like that to get in the top 1000.
The leaderboard isn’t completely arbitrary, but since there are so many people with less than 50 games under their belts who have ended up in top spots that it’s become very watered down.
Rank points gained from win chests at the end of Solo and Team Arenas have been moved.
The rank points will now be completely rewarded at the end of the match.This has the downside that if you win quick or have a disconnect in the middle you get less rewards now because the rewards are now based on the time you spend in the match. If you dc one minute before the end but come back quickly your 1500 rank turn into 100 or so.
Someone on our team is suffering from random dcs all the time so he gets much less rewards than before.
To top it of if you end with 0 points because of the dc he gets absolutly nothing instead of the equipment chest, glory and rankpoints you used to get before.
This is in need of an urgent fix.I know people with stable connection probably wont care, but as long as my team wants to carry this guy with unstable connection he shouldnt be punished for it in addition by the game.
So…we should try to balance the game around people who disconnect the game frequently?