Guild Wars 2

You can follow them with Flesh wurm and spectral walk which are both on the same or lower cooldowns, or just a ranged weapon. If he really wants to disengage, he could just shortbow 5 or stealth away, anyways, which the class also depends on.

The thief is cornered into Shadowstep because most of its utilities outright suck, and it’s the only 2+ DoT condition cleanse on the entire class, anywhere.

It is an extremely strong utility, but there are so few good ones and the class in such an odd balance state it’s either mandatory or just excellent because it’s better with the rest and there are better alternatives in the rest of the kit.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Just because people play for different reasons that doesn’t mean they’re all defensible. Someone could boot up Guild Wars 2 simply to troll other players and make everyone else have a bad time around them.

Besides, I am not “presuming” anything. His actions and opinions are quite defined and obvious. He literally says he doesn’t play the game to have fun. I personally find that to be incredibly destructive behavior.

A judgment call is absolutely being made here, but the evaluation isn’t based on conjecture. I am stating an opinion and you are welcome to disagree with it.

This is a dumb conversation, so you’re welcome to continue it without me.

I don’t go to work to have fun, but I do it anyways because I have obligations. I didn’t pick my career because I liked it; I did it because I need the inherently higher salary and rock-stable job to stay alive for medical reasons.

Despite the fact he may have said he doesn’t play the game itself to have fun, it means nothing as to why he does in fact play it.

It very well could be for community/friendship commitment reasons, supervising children online, or very much just part of a routine due to the nostalgia of what once was. For all we know, his alternatives may be doing similar activities due to disability, economic reasons, geographical location/environment… really anything. Even the possibility of him playing for cash isn’t out the window since we were never told if he does or doesn’t. Frankly, even the people who definitely are playing for cash have said the exact same thing; Toker came out and said he’d outright drop the game entirely if he wasn’t living off the money, just because the experience of playing PvP for him has gotten so miserable since HoT.

Offering insight to maybe take a break or asking why he plays to begin with at that point is one thing, but you were pretty kitten ed condescending in your tone while being pretty accusatory there’s something inherently wrong with the guy while never actually looking to get the question of why he really plays answered.

All the more likely we’re on the same page unless your screen is intentionally deceptive on your choice of utils

Yea I’m still around, albeit mostly on the boards these days. Glad to see you still running around. Forum PvP’s more interesting than what you find in the game for the most part :P Nothing else has really hooked my interest yet enough to move my foruming habits elsewhere haha.

Flanking Strike is very finnicky and its next-ability queue starts pretty much immediately as it’s first-casted, and in GW2, holding a skill down causes it to repeat-cast, so you need to be very quick on the release. Admittedly, I’ve only ever dropped shroud on necro/reaper when double-tapping by accident, though, so it’s very possible you’re just not fully realizing it if you suddenly get jittery.

If you’re using a mechanical keyboard, try not to press all the way down as it’s possible you’re re-activating it just as you’re bottoming-out the key before releasing it.

Really, you can quite obviously see that due to the inherent nature of safe damage and lack of build sacrifices made, the quality of the WvW experience has declined. Havoc and small-scale is dead because the quality of fights is just un-fun, and yet, for several years, it was wildly successful when people had even more damage and less defense in general, when killing even faster was more viable.

Further, and back to what I originally came to say, the nature of the argument of removing multiplicative modifiers is strictly not mathematically sound; all-rounder and unfocused builds gain objectively better performance than focused ones in this scenario, which would reduce build diversity inherently, and the optima would be more-easily calculated and much more rigid since degrees of “better-ness” start reaching what can only be defined as looking for the method of reducing diminishing performance returns when making alternative selections in different areas of one’s build. This enforces a no-rotational metagame or a strict class hierarchy that would only be resolved through developer interference with profession buffs and nerfs every so often, and would simply cause a rotation of what’s objectively optimal in every scenario versus providing some degree of a spectrum of effective build and play decision yields given a tolerance. I think it’s safe to say that professional Rock Paper Scissors doesn’t exist for good reason, because this is what ends up happening, which makes PvP in general more deterministic and less competitive.

The power creep of three full trait lines, power creep on gear and builds without sacrifice that provide simply more stats and more useful stats (Marauder gear, for example, buffing health between 25 to 50% with precision gains and only a 9% additive damage loss), combined with an excess of safe damage is what breaks competitive PvP environments and kills diversity. Reducing the capacity to deal damage will not make the game more competitive, nor will it increase the interest in the competitive formats from new players when they quickly come to recognize that there exists what could only be defined as no potential allowance for build diversity, rather than the result of an imbalanced game or strictly-too-powerful optima when compared to the rest of the game, which is what we’re seeing now.

Really, though, this thread shouldn’t exist; the previous version was just as pertinent to the topic (moreso now since it’s been derailed into Colin leaving GW2 and the “future” (lol) of WvW/PvP) has nothing to do with the discussion of the OP). I get there was huge backlash and OP wanted to hide the criticism, but it honestly reduces your credibility in the eyes of many.

@Aij, I’ve probably already concluded the build you’re likely using before lol. I worked out optimizations for Daredevil when it released to match signet damage with substantially better utility, and this is exactly what I mean by free damage. I’m a signet core thief loyalist, but what you’ve done only reinforces my point in that there are currently way too many easy ways to skirt the penalties that used to come along with playing for burst damage.

Swagger.1459:

Straegen.2938:

Blowing up players in a second or two creates a very unfriendly environment for new and casual players which are necessary for the long term health of WvW. In most sPvP encounters there is a back and forth that allows a newer player to learn. Most of the time new WvW players are dead before they know a fight started with little time to learn and adapt.

Unfortunately, the damage modifiers have become an escalation race that has limited diversity. Meta builds mostly have to go bunker, condi or push heavy into damage multipliers. Those players not running meta or pre-meta typically come on the forums and complain about how OP XYZ is or quit out of frustration.

Iirc, Deceiver is in the game industry… These bits of wisdom Streagen has brought up should be common knowledge for developers, and also for objective players who take competitive gameplay more seriously.

When GW (launched 2005) was around I was a pvper in City of Heroes (launched 2004) for around 5 years. It was a fast paced twitch based game, moment and positioning was a thing (when in GW you couldn’t even jump…), there were a ton of diverse roles to play… and this was before Twitch was around and ESL became popular…

Having played thousands of hours in zone pvp areas and arena matches it’s easy to see things that are off here… By “off” I mean a lot of things, but to give a statement that summarizes… The professions and skills in this game were built for pve and the devs have shoved all of those designs into pvp and wvw modes. Hence why I only spent 200 matches total in Spvp since launch and now taken to wvw more over the past year mostly out of boredom. Some awesome pve and wvw guildies are the main reason why I still play GW2 at all.

The anet devs have created a really great game at the core and have a lot of interesting designs, but their weak points are profession development and maintenance, and response time to problematic issues. Lack of open communication, outside of the super secret testers, is weak too, and that’s another reason why we see these lower quality and out of touch with gameplay profession balancing patch notes.

Last year, when Colin left, MO seemed to show some desire to improve wvw, so I’m hoping that he can start to deliver and not let portions of the gamebase down. The team is way more than capable of improving things, they just have to get organized and take all of their experiences over the past 4 launch years seriously and actually do something…

Edit- and there is not any perfect game, but the differences in effort to take core gameplay development seriously is night and day between anet and other big gaming studios.

I’m going to just ignore the smear, considering I didn’t even work in the development-side of the game I worked on, because at that point in my life I was still a teenager working across the country for a publisher whose actual developers were halfway across the planet.

On topic, I’m not really sure how dying quickly removes the competitive nature from a game considering often times the most competitive games (Various FPS titles, League, DotA, etc.) often feature content and promote quick player deaths. I think you’re confusing dying instantly without any capacity to retaliate like in P2W games versus dying instantly because your opponent is playing an all-in build, that dies just as fast and often will struggle or lose if the initial bomb is negated. Frankly, if a new player dies quickly and doesn’t understand or care to learn why, then I don’t really think there’s any validity in even bringing up the competitive scene since such a player would never and should never get there or be there to begin with. Not to mention, what the OP cites isn’t even that fast when compared to most other MMO’s. The screenshots dictate there was plenty of opportunity to react, especially given the professions he plays, at least enough to drive away or pressure the opposing player.

(Continued below)

I completely agree. Quite frankly, I actually to this day don’t really understand why Mordremoth was considered as such a big deal; he was largely isolated and went down extremely quickly without much of a fight. And mind you, this is a dragon that was supposedly in it for the long game; for all intents and purposes, we shouldn’t have seen his forces rally until way later considering just how quickly he went down.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Miyu.8137:

Top players facing mainly lower lvl players, even those out of top 250, and easily farm the skill rating. If the system would be fair as Anet announced, then top 100 would play against each other 90% of the time resulting the top 100 would change constantly as players maintain their lose/win streak.

You know that you get very small changes when you mostly win or lose as expected, right? Which is what the case is up in the top 100 and all. So, uh, top 100 player vs low rank player, top 100 wins, gains very little. They lose, though, they lose big!

So, yeah, your understanding of what causes changes in MMR is a little off, but … those top 100 players do mostly play other players of similar rankings. They do move up and down. Just not to the degree you seem to imagine they “must”.

The thing is it doesn’t work in the opposite direction which I think is what a lot of people are angry about.

You finally win that massively unfavorable game, and gain just as many points as you lost the game before when your team MMR was only five points higher than the other’s.

Losses are big but wins typically aren’t.

Vicky.4563:

DeceiverX.8361:

I highly suggest you post the gameplay in the ranger section and get some high-quality feedback from other ranger mains.

Please don’t. There are only like 3 rangers worth listening to that frequent the ranger subforum. The IQ of the entire population of ranger PvPers has tanked ever since Eurantien left. Now it’s filled with 3 decent guys and a whole host of crybaby whiners who sit around complaining about how unviable and useless rangers are and how the devs hate the class. And morons who want to get rid of pets because they can’t be kitten d to learn how it works.

I’m pretty sure this is the same for most players in general on all the professions.

There are still good rangers out there, and you’re more likely to get better feedback with substance there than from the PvP subsection which includes both those who think ranger is underpowered and those who think it’s overpowered.

I’m pretty sure the pet hate isn’t about pet viability but the exact opposite. I for one, just hate the very notion of being forced into having a companion on the battlefield because it relinquishes so much control of how you approach combat, and I think the very nature of the pet mechanic in GW2 is poorly-designed and implemented as well. They’re glorified boon cycling/trigger/proc-popping-suicide bots with needlessly high cooldowns and damage mitigation at this point.

If it hasn’t been mentioned, it’s important to know that if you’re using EA as a cleanse, it only removes conditions when dodging the real mesmer’s attacks; dodges on clone attacks will not cause conditions to be cleansed. Confusion also applies its extra damage on dodge, so it’s important to dodge at the right time and not frivolously use them trying to cleanse off clones; you’ll kill yourself this way.

Anything that modifies damage is applied after the damage would be dealt. Everything is multiplicative except for stacking Ferocity bonuses.

(Weapon damage * power * skill coefficient / opposing armor) * Ferocity modifier * (modifier1 * modifier 2 * modifier 3…)

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

For open-world and PvE full berserker should be fine. I play my build focused almost entirely around shroud, so I got as close to 50% as possible without going under to let Death Perception cover the rest. While Valkyrie has the better damage potential with food, it’s only the case in situations where you consistently cap vulnerability for Decimate Defenses to give you the other 50% crit chance. Capping vuln alone when moving target to target isn’t an easy or quick process, so this will end up making things slower if you depend on it. Being in berserker gear lets you pick Chilling Victory, instead, which boosts your sustained damage when against multiple foes and also provides you with life force acquisition when hitting a chilled foe. In anything but bossing/raids or situations where you focus a single target for a long period of time with the help from others via vuln capping, CV is the better choice unless you’re not running Soul Reaping.

Gravedigger generally speaking is pretty overrated, and Onslaught is the best GM trait to take in any scenario where you’ll be getting lots of kills or kill credit due to the reset on Death’s Charge, Soul Spiral, and Shroud 3’s stability and fear. BB is good in PvP environments with Sigil of Strength and Spite with CV as this allows for good sustain, but very aggressive builds benefit tremendously from Onslaught since it also decreases the time of channels by increasing their attack rate, making your kills much quicker. I don’t think BM is really worthwhile unless you’re either in PvP using the above sigil with BB or are bossing in a group which already caps might and vuln. For everything solo, I prefer to use Spite, CV, and Onslaught.

Protip: The reset from Onslaught doesn’t affect any skills currently being used, so it is important to keep this in mind when making channels with Soul Spiral or when around other players, as you might need to cancel them early to get the reset for the next target.

Hoochieman.3107:

Blaque,

I have yet to have someone compare a ‘viable’ build in WvW that is nonexistent in sPvP, whether the meta or not. The amulet system would allow you to swap stats on the fly versus only being able to use what you own. Let’s say you play a ‘theory-crafted’ Valkyrie thief with Exuberance runes and Furious Sharpening Stones in WvW currently…guess what? That build will still be viable post-amulet system.

I’ve managed to do very well playing D/D power signet core thief for the past few years, and this build absolutely mandates extremely granular tuning of the build to make work. Taking this into sPvP is pretty much suicide because it lacks damage in order to get a kill, lacks defense to take any hits/handle a condi bomb, and lacks utility while needed all while having a huge excess or shortage of stats depending on the selected amulet. In WvW, it can be tuned into semi-viability by wasting zero stat points. Conversely, this stat allocation only works optimally with explicitly D/D signets. Otherwise, there are much better routes for other weapons, although this distribution still works well enough on its own given trait compensation.

The same is said for my power reaper, which only performs as well as it does given very concise tuning when opposing most meta builds.

WvW in general to get this to work would also need to maintain its higher stats than sPvP’s existing amulets. The quicker pacing and bigger plays are a big part of the appeal to WvW skirmishing, and you’d lose a lot of people and build synergy if the stats were lowered. I’d actually like to see sPvP stats bumped up as I think it’d do wonders for enabling scaling builds to have enough to get a foothold.

If they just made a few generic nerfs like removing dire/TB and perplex/durability runes from the game I’m pretty certain a lot would open up. If they nerfed most of the elite specs, too, we’d be back in business for a ton of diversity. Historically, before HoT, WvW had a way bigger variety of at least semi-viable builds given they jive with the player. I had tons of fun with my no-GS BF-based S/S mesmer and mega-crit shroud necro a few years ago.

If I had to guess, it looks like CS/Acro/Daredevil as he doesn’t have Mug/ST/Lotus and has 12 initiative

Likely Flawless/PT/NQ in CS, PR/HtC/UH inAcro, and HM/EA/UC in Dardevil

Likely also running a mix of Marauder weapons/armor and Berserker/Valkyrie accessories for the health and crit chance, with Furious Oils and Steak Frittes or some power/precison food.

Good to see other power D/D play, though.

Straegen.2938:

Damage Modifiers are the real culprit here. They are multiplicative meaning they amplify each other. No big hitter that I know of can pull off massive shots without them. They should have been additive or better yet removed and replaced with straight power additions.

Stand The Wall.6987:

nerf burst
nerf tank
nerfbat loves all

Which is what is rolling in sPvP for better or worse.

I don’t agree because additive scaling or simply raw numbers makes optimization and the emergence of overpowered abilities and skills too strict and too confined. This is the reason why bunker boon builds have dominated PvP forever, and why boons are cited as being overpowered; a build needs to have no direct synergy while it maintains a disproportionately advantageous gain when explicitly not stacking into a stat or focusing around a given strategy or concept. In terms of trying to make the game more diverse and more difficult to optimize, many multiplicative modifiers is the way to go.

More appropriate is that these modifiers not be so easily-achieved or achieved without sacrifice like they are with most of the new elites; Daredevil for example provides a .1 and a .07 modifier on top of another potential .1 modifier which makes it almost as potent as a fully-maxed-damage Crit Strikes trait allocation while still pushing out an extra evade, endurance on steal, and a very strong condition cleanse. Berserker does similar; the list goes on. In the case of other professions (I went through every other profession in the other thread juxtaposing their superior burst options on similar-or-effectively-lower cooldowns), most of their numbers are typically gained from just having higher coefficients and/or the capacity to stack 25 might easily (a static bonus) which makes them hit just as hard or harder with typically more in-build safety, since they no longer need to aim for stacking six to ten traits of small modifiers to stack to get big damage (like necro/reaper and ranger).

If the amount of safe or even punishment-free damage (Like Defy Pain and other auto-defense procs or sustained defenses) was reduced, I think we’d be in a better game-state, since dealing such big burst would mandate build sacrifices and provide no covering for misplays or freebies to get the damage in.

I don’t mean to sound rude, but frankly, OP, I don’t think anything is keeping you down, and more appropriately it’s players who play like this that are the cause of dissent as to why some people are held down in the silver/gold tiers. Granted, none of you seemed to play particularly well.

I’m going to have to just suggest you do some research on general PvP map awareness and in general look for play improvements on the ranger/druid. There were a huge number of mistakes made in the video in respects to playing the profession alone that I just really can’t begin to break down them all. I highly suggest you post the gameplay in the ranger section and get some high-quality feedback from other ranger mains. While I can point out mistakes and maybe make some suggestions, I can’t guarantee that the suggestions I make will be optimal enough to work into the higher divisions of PvP since I rarely play ranger. You’ll be able to pick these up, as well as the more subtle nuances to the profession, elsewhere.

In all reality, though, you’re probably a little bit above where you belong.

It’s no different than most other specs, frankly.

Condition cleansing needs to be either made substantially more accessible in general, or made more widespread with fewer mass-cleanses while reducing the condition breadth applicability of everyone else.

It’s the main reasoning why the elite specs are so strong; they pretty much all include multiple trait-line’s-worth of utility to reduce these awkward dependencies, but yet the mandated lines are still mandated just because every little extra ounce of utility outweighs something like a cooldown reduction or 10% damage.

Nilkemia.8507:

It needs a revamp, the whole class and specialization. At first Reaper seemed like the fix that was needed, but now it’s clear to me that it’s just a band-aid to a gash in the side. All of the lingering problems are still there and so easily exploited, and most other specializations simply got stronger.

The lingering problems still linger because what the reaper offset from the core game, the rest of the elites also negated.

Nerf HoT, problems go away. Necro/Reaper is largely in an awesome state in the confines of core game right now.

Don’t think they’re out-dated; my browsing habits haven’t really changed over the past few years and I’m certain that on a few of them (since I visit these sites often), the sites had HoT-related ads when it launched/since its launch. Defaulting back to old ads is definitely something new.

Ashen.2907:

A new movie with a lead actor that won a couple of Oscars forty years ago, and who has done nothing worthwhile since, will emphasize, “with two time Oscar award winning actor ….”

Its not necessarily an effort to distance the actor from poor roles, just a common tactic of pointing out the positives.

Just seems kind of odd to be happening now, don’t you think?

Zero Day.2594:

Sounds pretty do-able.

They will gut the daredevil spec and then make the one you’re suggesting.

No, they’ll continue to gut Acrobatics instead lol.

I’d really rather not see another a dodge spec, tbh. That’d make 3/7 lines entirely based on dodging.

Nerfed in PvP formats with an explicity VS build, buffed for baseline thief not running a VS build, and generally buffed in PvE since the venoms which got explicitly nerfed weren’t really used much, anyways.

Sykper.6583:

Rodzynald.5897:

But what should we do in situations when one (so called “carry”) is tanking 2 or 3 enemy players, and the rest of the team still manages to die and not take a single cap?

Well at that point lose the game, queue up and win the next one?

Let’s be honest, if you can consistently create advantages for your team because you are a player better than the rank you are currently at, you will start rising in rating. You will start having slightly more competent teammates than the previous rank, and if you rinse and repeat, your teammates are more likely to capitalize on you being a baws at far holding down the support and Necro (somehow).

I do expect that in bronze you will have teammates more susceptible to losing a 4v3 at mid or some other matchup, but not every single game in bronze is like that. Simple math really, 4 bronzes beat 3 bronzes.

I’ll be totally honest, though, I’d say a good third of the games I’ve played have been like the above.

The deal is this; the majority of PvP players are where they deserve to be, and they’re going to understand that.

Obviously sub-par players getting lucky and carried into divisions they do not belong are not going to complain because they’re doing better than they should be or think they are also where they should be.

The vocal minority, however, is going to be the equally-or-smaller-sized group which gets perpetually unlucky and quite knowingly and obviously are not in the divisions they belong in.

So you’re going to get complaints made by a small portion of people largely all claiming to be better than they are placed with a fair degree of truth backed nothing by anecdotal evidence, while the majority is in the right place. It’s only logical to make the assumption it’s their fault, but mathematically-speaking, it’s very probable these people are actually being mis-represented.

I spent over 200 games struggling in silver due to big losses from what were caused mostly by scenarios like the above after losing my first game after placements in gold by less than 30 points. Aside from when I started decaying a number of days ago from just not playing GW2/PvP’ing, I never played a game in Bronze. That said, it was not uncommon for me to be dealing 50%+ team damage and all six top-player bonuses in these games as well. Given even a single good heavy on my team, I’d usually be in a position to carry; given more or less, the games would be blowouts in both directions. Meanwhile, there is a tiny fraction of the player base that just gets strictly lucky in matchups and go 15-0 to top the leaderboards. They are likely great players as well, but a big streak of wins isn’t impossible and is likely probable given the number of PvP matches that happen in a day. I know a number of people who got into higher tiers, decayed into lower ones, and got stuck there due to a streak of losses.

Largely I think people are where they deserve to be, but there will definitely be edge cases that strictly speaking have very valid complaints. As time has gone on this season, the complaint threads have gone down generally-speaking with people settling in better, but mathematically speaking, there will be players who absolutely do not deserve to be in the tiers they’re in.

Typically indicative of an imbalance somewhere, be it matchmaking by rank or profession comps.

Either way I think the PvP community is too small to really bring any substantial meaning to Ranked play aside from the very top tiers, and the swingy-matchups are pretty much impossible to balance in multiple levels without extremely long queues.

You’d probably see more balanced matchups if there wasn’t a storm of new/PvE players wanting ascended gear loot boxes achievable via grinding games and not caring about the win/loss. Although you could argue that with so many fewer people playing, the potential pool of candidates to create a good matchup would be heavily reduced and possibly have the same effect.

Overall, the game-state right now via profession design and PvP objective design is just not conducive to housing a substantive competitive PvP environment.

While doing some internet browsing today I came across a few GW2 ads. I noticed something interesting about them which made them much different from other recent ads.

None of them even mentioned HoT, and the animated ads themselves all featured reviews and ratings given to the game from sources when it launched, rather than the expansion, citing the game’s critical acclaim from 2012, with absolutely no sign or trace of the new content whatsoever.

Other ads for the past year or so have all featured the HoT name and logo.

Seems kind of odd, and begs the question if ANet is trying to distance itself from the expansion due to its poor sales performance and underwhelming reviews/overwhelming negativity surrounding it.

On the other hand, it could suggest the next expansion may be coming up fairly soon and they don’t want to market the “soon”™-to-be-old-expansion’s content nearby a new release, although I do see this as kind of strange to not advertise the game as it’s sold.

Thoughts?

Devourment.2987:

Hmmm, i’m still not exactly sure where “End game” is in Guild wars, at the moment i’m more interested in PvP, still doesn’t answer my question though, surely the highest concentration i.e the vast majority can’t all be doing Fractals and raids.

Due to the pretty blatantly systematic destruction of most of the skilled play requirements from PvP and WvW with the expansion in favor of the PvE crowd, most of the active competitive population outright quit.

While PvE has always had more players in general, the disparity has never been more apparent.

Quite frankly, the highest concentration of active players is in fact doing open world bag farming in the highly-profitable expansion zones, fractals, and raids.

Fay.2357:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Fay.2357:

BeepBoopBop.5403:

apharma.3741:

Cynz.9437:

apharma.3741:

Cynz.9437:

I don’t think mes are broken, only things i would changes is
- CS shouldn’t reset elites. Maybe allow cs reduce CD on elite but not complete reset
- clones really should stop running at light speed. I understand they wanted to stop kiting of the shatters however issue is not that shatters became undodgable. If you dodge into shatter, the clones assume you didn’t dodge but moved and instead of stopping for shatter actually continue to chase you. Idc what they do it but shatters should be consistent so you have chance to dodge them instead of eating full condi crap despite dodging into shatter.

The problem with your second point is that HoT brought a lot of movement speed for everyone so shatters without superspeed simply don’t hit anymore unless detonated instantly at 0 range.

Swiftness might make them able to hit but there’s still the problem of people can just run and kite the shatters easily assuming moderate distance to the clones. It doesn’t bode well for new elite specs though, there’s nothing more depressing than seeing shatters on base mesmer chasing after someone with swiftness and never being able to catch them.

1 boon shutting down a class mechanic and needing a trait to counter.

I understand the issue but shatters ignoring dodges is not OK. Imagine all my attacks would land on your regardless what you did. This is how it is fighting mes atm.
They need to fix it somehow, maybe make clones actually register the dodge better instead of ignoring it….

I haven’t had this problem, sure I’ve dodged and got hit by a clone but I put that down to I dodged too soon or too late and one hit me. I’m not saying it’s not happening only that I haven’t seen it happen and only really heard of this from you and after 10 pages of bugs forum no mention of it nor have I seen a post in the mesmer subforum.

If someone has a video of clones hitting through dodges it would help figuring out what’s happening at least for the devs. I have no problems with it being fixed if it is happening though because that’s obviously not the way it should work, you should be able to dodge all attacks.

You’re misunderstanding. It doesn’t hit through dodges. It just waits till your dodge is over then hits you after.

This only happens if you dodge away from the clones. If you dodge through the path of the clones they’ll explode on you as you dodge them. This is how people have known to properly dodge shatters since the launch of GW2.

It happens even if you dodge into them, I mainly see it happen that way when running Thief With UC something about it causes the clones to not explode until after the dodge ends. I have seen it in very rare cases without UC but those are far and few in between.

What’s probably happening there is that UC actually pushes you past the hitbox of the clones so quickly that they register it as simply moving you out of their range again. That’s going to be a problem limited to UC, no other class or trait choice should produce that result.

Was about to say the same thing but double-checked to see if it got said here.

UC’s extra movement often causes the clones to not be in the PBAoE damage radius they need to be within to detontate and thus they don’t shatter, as they track by positioning. Even without the mobility bonus, it should result in the same effect; the thing is, when against a non-speedy-clone one UC’ed dodge in this case would just allow the thief to kite away since the clones wouldn’t be able to catch up and would time out.

My bigger gripe with the movement speed thing is how difficult it often is to lose clone aggro when disengaging since they move so quickly. I’ve had clones follow me halfway across the map because I’m just unable to outrun them on most professions aside from thief and ranger. Although I don’t really know how this could be fixed since clones need a fairly long tether to be usable in the first place with the kinds of tricks that need to be pulled by the mesmer in general.

Dawdler.8521:

There is absolutely no way to design fun 1v1 combat that doesnt mean 2v1 is always the stronger choice.

Ergo zergs.

Because human brain stuff 101.

Not even.

It’s not going away because the entire framework supporting the purpose of small groups in WvW was systematically removed with HoT, exacerbated by what can only be defined as an un-fun PvP experience in general in the game that came from the elite specs’ poor designs and power creep.

So with the small-scale-havoc and PPT scene completely and totally destroyed, there’s no incentive to not just omniblob/ktrain since it’s actually the most optimal strategy, now, and nobody really has fun doing otherwise unless it’s just scumbag gankers who get off on 5+v1’ing people, as most of the diversity and skilled play in small-scale has since been outright removed/nullified.

Like pretty much every issue in the game right now, it’s all on profession design and balance at its core.

Sadly, that team seems to be the one that tries to make the fewest changes possible, while somewhere in the chain there’s a critical failure of understanding that the entire game is tilting away from success because of the poor decision-making made here.

As far as “modernizing” support roles into ranged capability; that’s very, very far from “modernizing” its identity; core D&D and most games since have kept the support as some kind of backline buffer/augmenter for the melee beatface. Fact is that there’s simply too much support and sustain available in the game right now in general and next to no build investment to get it. We don’t need to fall back to ancient, dated, and frankly underwhelming role-based systems to make WvW any good; the very nature of the professions and sustain and supportive abilities in the game just need to be re-examined and rebuilt to promote a healthier state of build variety and purpose for each individual and the goal his or her group is trying to achieve.

Fixing the forum bug.

Dawdler.8521:

Aeolus.3615:

Nimbl.8957:

this thread belongs on the cancer boards… come on.

and LOL at the Mag guy who thinks he needs 2-3 thieves to 1 shot a commander.

Anet, fix the moa invis bug and call it a day.

Actually it only take 2 power ranger :}

power ranger hits arround 2-3k(i had some 4k crits in the past ) on heavys wiht 3.5k armor+protection, its isnt hard to pressure a commander down.

And sniping commandders it is all fine…. even onw wars getting the enemy comamnder could stop the enemy its a natural thing.

Range damage migh need to be reduced and aoe spam the same, so we can use skills on reset nights, lag is still way to much… when one side can use skills and the other dont, and our healing skills is on looooaaaadddiinnnngg…. wait for it wait for it…

That’s kind of weak compared to a fully buffed lich hitting for 5-10k on auto-attack.

Can be more. If you really help that necro get stacked you can push those AA’s to more than 20k ;D

Was gonna say I’m getting pretty close to building a full stack of the things; granted, I’m into the thousands for WvW rank.

Either way, go for major objectives. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one for anything less than a tower.

Rashagar.8349:

Zero Day.2594:

Drakz.7051:

Because it is all about the Meta, if you are not playing meta for min/max stats you are not wanted in parties, hard to believe from the game that wanted us to play how we wanted.

…

It’s not really the game that imposes the meta on players…
It’s the players imposing the meta on players.

If you get into, say “hardcore” raiding, then one would expect from other hardcore players to be on top of the ball on builds and such… But it’s your choice to push your self that far to hang with the “hardcore”…

The others that you meet in pugs and demand that you play meta, are somewhat understandable too. By running the meta, the thought is that it will take less effort and time to overcome a task, so pugs tend to favor that religiously – even if the players aren’t performing well enough to bring out the “meta-ness” in w/e meta build their running, and could perform better on a non-meta build. But it’s the belief that the task will be easier to over with a meta build that defies their reasoning – and beliefs are hard to change.

gets kind of teary eyed
very carefully replaces the intended reply with a simple…

+1

Nothing to add except for appreciation of eloquence.

Something that I wish more people recognized a long time ago when I posted walls on this topic; the existence of the “berserker (gear type) meta” is entirely player-made and in terms of run consistency, sub-optimal. It just came down to people demanding efficiency for gold gains or people who were dumb and senselessly copied the hardcore scene. Nothing’s going to change that demand for raw efficiency, ever, as even the concept of the trinity and roles are just an exacerbated and design-enforced meta-optimization done on the developer-side of things.

The only thing to offset this is to frequently update and change the existing PvE content and provide alternatives for other builds to potentially save time (tank thief in the old Thaumanova fractal crossing the fume chamber to skip a boss, for example).

Otherwise you’ll just end up in an infinite cycle of emergent optimizations, which, let’s face it, are very easy to achieve in this game to the blatant trait-power disparity and the half-dead-snail-crawl-pacing of the profession changes.

As for the optimization in PvP, and lack of viability, well, there’s going to be similar optimization for the top-end, but the meta is set in stone just because the game as it stands is horribly balanced and most elites are just abysmally-designed, major power creep.

PvE, whatever you’re comfortable with.

PvP/WvW, Marauder is pretty much the only choice unless you like getting repeatedly one-shotted by builds with two to four times your effective health and multiple invulns/defenses you’ll be unable to slip through; you won’t race them in damage and absolutely won’t in durability; marauder is just insurance so that zero-cast-time-instant-nuke doesn’t auto-down you. In WvW Berserker/Valkyrie mix is also good.

Don’t use Crit Strikes in PvP/WvW unless you want to handicap yourself; every trait line except SA on the trapper cancer build is better.

Again, I don’t think it’s a problem with making the kit inherently overpowered in terms of damage application but rather the fact that dire/tb is already so tanky combined with having a disengage and a condition applicator on what’s effectively no cooldown on top of the Daredevil while providing the capacity to get solid numbers. In most scenarios these days for WvW, the back-and-forth about the strength of conditions tends to be roughly the same as power builds given the number of % damage-reducing modifiers and permanent protection, etc. The thief in particular, operating under the assumption of small-scale (since thief has little purpose elsewhere in WvW) has great condition application capability in general.

For the most part, condition builds offer a substantially lower skill requirement in WvW than power builds due to the existence of dire/TB stats. Obviously their lack of existence in sPvP makes them much more reasonable in that environment, and again, that’s kind of where I draw the line for why SStrike among other condition options available in the game can’t really see much improvement.

Given the removal of Dire/TB gear, I’d totally support what you’re suggesting, and in fact, a lot of condition builds could probably be improved upon (granted I also believe dedicated cleanses and the interplay of skills/traits and damage mitigation/condition cleansing both need reworks); unfortunately I can’t justify further-increasing the potency of this build in particular due to how durable it is in nature in the WvW environment and how low of a barrier of entry it consequently has in what’s already a very condition-heavy game-state in the format due to the inherent disadvantages of power-based damage in the format, currently.

Going to have to disagree; the concern for WvW isn’t the damage but the innate durability on condi builds there via dire/TB gear and innately higher condition durations from higher expertise and food.

SStrike in this scenario ends up providing solid damage and makes the P/D player virtually impossible to kill by melee opposition due to the innate durability on its armor, while dealing fairly high damage and poking for hits from range. P/D fell from being one of the most powerful/easy WvW dueling builds in 2015 simply because the sustain in the game went up. While torment stack doubling fixes this issue, it doesn’t fix the problem that at the time when it was a frequently-used build, is was frankly pretty overpowered. We’re talking what’s effectively a safer version of the PU condi mes.

Unlike PvP, the build isn’t relegated to staying in confined spaces, either, and thus that repeated disengage over flatter, larger spaces without compromising a win also gets much better as a defensive ability as well.

Not to mention, conditions hurt much more per tick in WvW due to the higher stats in general and things like Crystals which further bolster this damage substantially.

If dire/TB gear didn’t exist; surely; and even the condi mesmer wouldn’t be deemed overpowered. The sad fact, though, is that so long as these armors are in the game, any remotely-slippery condition build ends up being way too strong. And P/D re-using Shadow Strike for disengages on a tank build while applying pressure isn’t exactly skill-intensive.

Sorem.9157:

PvP already is one of the worst ways to make money. The second it gets something new and unique people start complaining its unfair? PvP didn’t even have rewards for over an YEAR! All we had was silly little skins that we couldn’t even wear outside of HOTM.

Oh, bite me

Please, instead of asking for them to remove PvP rewards, acknowledge the fact that wvw is much more favored when it comes to rewards. SPECIALLY when you take into consideration that you’re ‘’time gated’’ to get decent rewards out of PvP because you can’t reach those rewards on offseason

Its unfair, QQ.QQ.QQ.

I’m sorry to say you’re massively mistaken.

WvW loses its profitability quickly when you consider expenses like siege and food. This usually hovers around 3-5g/hour and typically results in net losses in money.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Found a couple minor bugs in addition to the lack of reshuffling. I’ve also worked on a new version of the matchmaker that will improve roster size and profession matching. We will likely trial it during the off-season.

If I remember, I will update the wiki!

Good to see this. But why not lock professions before the queue pops? Seems silly to have matchmaking adjust for MMR and then likely be abused by people who swap.

The way I see it is I’d be more inclined to queue as something that then isn’t the profession I’d like to play to force MMR to roll something for the enemy that my desired swap/main hard-counters. Ultimately I think it might just make things even worse and more toxic/frustrating in the end.

As far as cadence goes, it’s kind of whatever. As a fellow developer, I agree in that you can’t really make changes to MMR midway through a season for both technical and design reasons.

However, the seasons are a bit short (MMR doesn’t get a long enough time to do its job properly) and the cadence on the profession team is definitely too slow in respects to keeping things interesting. Pushing a balanced and most importantly a fun game trumps any small stability issues that may arise, and faster iteration here lets for faster bug fixing; after all, you’ll always be playing catch-up anyways, and this lets for things like reworks (as many facets of the professions, especially elites desperately need) to happen more frequently to shake up the game just enough to keep the meta moving around. Nothing’s really changed in over a year since the elite spec launches; many argue it’s just gotten worse due to the stagnation and hyper-optimization with what are blatantly-obviously-best builds for every profession.

Cheers, though; love the communication. Absolutely great to see this kind of interaction with a competitive game-mode developer.

I genuinely don’t have an answer for the mob in Orr. I’ve never had it happen to me before. All I can think of is some kind of lag/extrapolation or latency spike; the mob’s running behavior made no sense, either.

OriOri.8724:

DeceiverX.8361:

I have no idea what you’re talking about; rev was and still is totally balanced – it only dealt more than half of my relatively-tanky thief’s health pool in an AA or close to 95% of its baseline health

Seriously, though, mesmer burst can be amazing/potentially some of the best in the game. Running that kind of build and winning with it just takes more skill/good timing/practice than some other professions and most builds these days cough to pull off.

Power burst is largely a two-way street for most builds; you’re going to be making big sacrifices somewhere to pull it off. That’s why condition bomb builds are busted lol.

I know this is the mesmer forum, so no one that needs to see this will, but the reason that mesmers burst can and should be one of the highest in the game is because there’s so much that goes into a power shatter burst on a mesmer. Your build has almost no survivability, you need to blow 6+ skills to pull it off, any of which can be blocked (or more likely with HoT power creep, will trigger a passive that will kitten you up), and you have to do it all before the other player can respond. Mesmer has to invest in it to get a good burst out of it, so they absolutely deserve to have a high burst.

But then we have classes like Rev that can do absolutely ridiculous damage with little to no investment, without blowing CDs like the mesmer has to.

I’m not criticizing it; I think it’s totally fine to shell out that kind of damage, frankly. The only thing I dislike about mesmer burst is the fact it can happen from chained stealth. I have the same dislike for D/P thief with BP/HS/Bound.

Pre-HoT, pretty much every build in the game needed to commit a ton of resources in some shape or form to deal massive burst damage. Currently, it’s just not true when looking at how passive (and notably how strong) so many defensive traits are, and how generally speaking, the game has gotten much tankier without losing much damage, or in many cases, has gotten more of both.

Rev, like Chrono, Daredevil, and every other elite, is the result of poor design covered up by an attempted change to numbers.

Pretty much the same story with every elite; they all need huge nerfs, the sole outlier being the reaper which needs only a few tweaks here and there to round out the spec for different builds.

What do I expect? 1800-range unblockable instant-cast skills with 20.0 damage coefficients with everyone running passive permanent 90% damage reduction tied to their new elite spec mechanic and runes, permanent stealth on guardian, and new DoT conditions without increasing the number of cleanses.

Based on HoT and how they’ve managed the disaster so far, it’ll probably the final nail in the coffin for me to never see a reason to log in again.

I have no idea what you’re talking about; rev was and still is totally balanced – it only dealt more than half of my relatively-tanky thief’s health pool in an AA or close to 95% of its baseline health

Seriously, though, mesmer burst can be amazing/potentially some of the best in the game. Running that kind of build and winning with it just takes more skill/good timing/practice than some other professions and most builds these days cough to pull off.

Power burst is largely a two-way street for most builds; you’re going to be making big sacrifices somewhere to pull it off. That’s why condition bomb builds are busted lol.

Depends on what you do.

PvE? Whatever, still healthy enough, as the user said above me.

PvP and WvW? Find another game. Overall the profession design and balance is probably some of the worst of most MMO’s out there, frankly, and those respective populations are down by huge amounts comparatively speaking from just a year and a half ago. HoT’s elite specs massively broke the game’s competitive formats.

Fixing the forum bug.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Electra.7530:

Highest and worst damage ever done to me was vault, hit me for around 9k. I was appalled. But, the numbers on the screen shots in here are way more appalling.

Kinda like how this number is appalling? Or 20k Gunflames, or 15-20KCoRs or any other number of classes and skills that do more damage?

This game is a joke all around, with every class. Thank the balance Devs

Alright, whoa, now…

While I agree Gunflames, CoR’s and Vaults are ridiculous… Things like Maul bursts or Mesmer Shatters are a different story. That requires blowing multiple cooldowns and preparing to burst someone or gambling your chances and hoping it lands (which is never wise might I add, because then you’re sitting on a ton of cooldowns).

I’ve seen some insane Maul bursts, same with Drake Tail Swipes. Both are gimmicks and useless in the vast majority of scenarios. To top it off, the victim in that picture is an uplevel, I’m about 90% sure of it.

I understand the point you were trying to make but I just wanted to point out that a Maul burst is a lot different than just pressing literally one button and doing insanely high damage.

Even in the case of vault and backstab, those kinds of sacrifices do need to be made as well. Without investing entirely into damage in traits/signets of power and consuming utilities, vault isn’t hitting for anything more.

Like the rest of the game post-HoT, however, the problem remains that you have an ability which both negates damage and does massive damage on a very short effective cooldown. While I think vault’s damage can absolutely use a shave since it’s so initiative-friendly and packs such high damage for those reasons alone, the bigger issue here isn’t the damage but the utility on top of the damage. Killshot still does more damage than Gun Flame, PW and Unload more than Vault, and those are not ever complained about, probably because they leave their respective players so vulnerable in general. The same is said about maul ranger, signet burst D/D thief, and signet core warrior; they’ve always had ridiculous burst potential, and none of them have historically been good builds due to the sacrifices made to get that damage often making them ineffective outside of edge-case use.

While vault itself is comparatively massively overpowered compared to the core game, and while not running huge burst it does high damage and is easy to use and relatively safe in mid-level play, it’s really not much different than most other HoT content.

Bottom line, HoT elites all need absolutely tremendous nerfs.

freeman.7315:

We were promised by a Game Designer Karl McLain

Well there’s your problem.

If it’s not Guardian, it’s not getting fixed.

Next OP will just ask to remove gates and walls from structures to let the brainless ktrain cap easier lol.

This is one of the very few tactical plays left available in GW2 and quite frankly has been around since its inception.

Doing anything other than sniping the commander is frankly just admitting your group’s tactics and cohesion are strictly worse than those of three years ago.

Basically, play better, and get your allies to play better and not depend on one dude with an icon, too.

Not really. Of the ones they select in the meta build, only four are really selected since the remaining come as freebies in their respective trait lines, and the whole justification for picking those lines comes from other traits, and three of those selected are in Trickery which is the class mechanic line, which naturally affects mostly steal (yet it’s mostly taken for Preparedness/ToTC).

I don’t necessarily think steal is overloaded so much as it’s just terrible when it isn’t; without Trickery it’s probably one of the worst profession mechanics out there and DA just makes it amazing from weakness + poison + mug damage+ heal. The thing is, there’s no synergy anywhere else except SA, and DA/Tr are already amazing/required trait lines for other reasons as it is. Since stealth attacks got nerfed and BV stacks are down, the profession’s just generally weak without so much front-loaded stuff on the only reliable mechanic it has access to. Obviously Daredevil is just an excessive amount of powercreep like the rest of the elites.

The thief as a whole is in a weird spot that demands other things be nerfed with the intention to fix it in response to these changes. While I think the Headshot-ID problem is solvable through a very short ICD just to remove the efficacy of mindless spam making favorable matchups for the thief just un-fun (which is what most people complain about and I think this has merit across all professions), but short enough to allow an interrupt style of play to work successfully, the profession and the rest of the game need a lot more tuning.

A considerable portion of the problem is how the distribution of stats in sPvP affects the thief since it functions substantially better with more granular stat allocation options than the amulet system, while this is further exacerbated by the very nature of capture-and-hold gameplay which favors tanks/sustain and punishes stealth and mobility in it of itself.

I’ll be totally honest, I think Karl when making the Daredevil and ID was too fixated on making D/D Viper’s death blossom spam a viable build that it’s why it has an insane damage coefficient and isn’t allowed to crit. Unfortunately he failed to recognize the fact the meta build has been running a spammable interrupt (which didn’t see much use except in pro play for major skill casts, and even then, historically steal has been better) since the dawn of time.

Archon.6480:

…I still say S1 had the closest skill matches. The bunker meta messed up that season, but the matchmaking was the most accurate since launch.

Because simply put, there were more people playing.

HoT has killed off so much of the competitive scene (including WvW) that the problem isn’t the matchmaking algorithms but rather the game just not being good enough for people to actually want to play.

This leads the algorithms to become less effective as doing something as easy as finding ten similarly-skilled players isn’t something that can regularly happen.

Crinn.7864:

Apolo.5942:

so it is logical that they would do power creep over the current ones to sell them,

That makes no marketing sense at all. Such a strategy requires a total misunderstanding of where the audience is and where sales come from.

PvE’ers will buy into HoT for the story, zones, new stat combos, and raids. The potency of Elites will not affect sales there.

The only group whos sales are affected by elites are players that purely do PvP and WvW to the exclusion of all else. However most of this group will buy in for either brand loyalty, or access to Revenant.

There is no data or precedent for power creep increasing sales. Industry wisdom says that pay-for-power doesn’t work on the western market has shown buy every time a Asian p2w game comes to the west and promptly fails.

Disagree entirely; most of the people who support the existing elite specs at their current power are primarily or exclusively PvE players who want viability/power in their PvE content for easier clears. Frankly, HoT was a PvE expansion since even before its release most of the PvP sub-communities were already asking for nerfs or calling out objectively bad design decisions, which never got changed spare some numbers tweaks.

Most of the competitive environment downright quit with HoT; the only ones left for the most are are just the bile of players that prefer being overpowered/prefer innately gimmicky mechanics, and quite factually, they make up only a minority of the remaining players in the game, now.

And yes, while all games that run power creep pretty much fail, this is very clearly the model GW2 is heading to. There’s a reason so many people have been calling the profession designers inept and/or further boycotting all forms of providing money to ANet.

At its very core, the nature of the remaining players/loyal customers at this point are going to be those who prefer the power creep. WvW and PvP are at their least-populous states in the history of the game, suggesting definitive dislike.

We’ve seen ANet’s response – nothing – over an entire year since HoT and four years of broken core spec/design dynamics as well. While we can’t be sure what the cause is specifically, it comes down to either it being an intentional ploy to try and boost expansion revenue (bad business as you say above) by luring players to purchase the power creep to help make the “disappointing” HoT sales (per NCSoft’s report) look better proving ineptitude on the managerial level due to the long-term consequences, being inept at fixing the problems plaguing the game (the profession design team), or simply being unaware/in denial that there are actually any problems (ineptitude on PR/Comm teams and management).

Regardless of whether or not ANet’s decisions make sense, some area of the company is absolutely and undeniably failing the company and subsequently the game and its clients.

Really, if it made sense, there wouldn’t be so much criticism.

Jana.6831:

It’s better, thanks anet.
Was busy with the JP over the holidays, so it took me a while to see how combat changed.

@ Deceiver: It’s about moving targets. If your usual combo was: signetsignetsignet steal+CnD target down then you likely didn’t notice it.

And sorry I’m bumping this, I just think it would be unfair to not give a positive feedback on a positive change.

ETA: There is one video in which it is very clear. It was taken 2 years ago but isn’t in my possession. I should’ve recorded it again, I know, but I’m kind of in a love/hate relationship with this game and recording, editing, uploading is more hassle than to write another topic. Sorry.

Not even. I play S/D heavily for diving large groups of players to force cooldowns just before fights begin and thus rarely burn anything until I intend to go in for the kill. In this game state more than one backstab is typically also necessary, and I’ve had no issues with CnD failing except when admittedly out of range.