Guild Wars 2

Since the golden-boy guardian is having a problem it’s very possible Karl will demand a fix for his favorite profession.

We’ll see if it’s exclusive though as it might be internally deemed too overpowered for the rest to not have the problem lol.

Dirame.8521:

My only advice is this, if you’re going to use Greatsword, don’t use staff. Having two slow weapons will ALWAYS get you killed by fast specs.

Exactly, which emphasizes the point made above; GS is an aggressive melee utility weapon for the most part and staff is pure utility. Since you can’t treat GS as a true mainhander you’ll screw yourself running the two together.

I like to think that by far and large, if you’re running GS, OH dagger on your secondary is pretty much a hard requirement for the utility that it can cover as opposed to staff that GS misses out on.

Nothing will save CnD or really even S/D without first nerfing boons and block access to begin with, honestly, unless they just make Flanking Strike unblockable, but that’s just bad and lazy design.

The set will never be good if both are so easily-spammed.

SuperKorean.7345:

I recently played this game called El*er Sc*ol*s On*in* for about 200 hours.
In El*er Sc*ol*s On*in* , there is a stealth class called Nightblade.
Once you get some mana regeneration gears , Nightblade can do perma stealth.
The mana can regenerate faster than the mana cost of stealth. And there is no cooldown.
This means Nightblade can go into stealth “instantly” + “permanently” + “repeatedly”
In El*er Sc*ol*s On*in* , any class can equip any weapon.
Let me explain what happens when a stealth class equips a strong ranged weapon.
With this stealth + longbow Nightblade,
I can go into stealth and sneak behind you and shoot one or two arrows at you from long distance.
I go back into stealth before you turn around.
I sneak behind you again and shoot one or two arrows at you from long distance.
I go back into stealth before you turn around.
I repeat this until you die.
Also, I do 300% damage for a few seconds when I leave stealth so my arrows can hurt you even if you are full tank.
Also, all my attacks do critical damage for a few seconds when I leave stealth.
Also, my arrows apply “Damage Over Time” so your health is going down while I stay in stealth.
Also, I regenerate my health in stealth and I have 200% movement speed boost in stealth.
With this stealth + longbow Nightblade, I have killed five enemy players by myself.
When I duel another Nightblade player, both of us stay in stealth forever and we cannot kill eachother.
I can guarantee you that it will be fun to play stealth + long range combat class.
I can guarantee you that it won’t be fun to play against stealth + long range combat class.

Which is precisely why it’s important to design professions both ways.

Otherwise you end up with things like Berserker and DH and Daredevil that are just frustrating to play against and make the game in general for everyone less fun.

If you want range, you’re going to have to do without stealth; if you want stealth, you’re going to have to do without range.

I’d like to see him do it on power tbh :\

JDjitsu.7895:

To be fair, Power War/Zerker it’s stronger than any of the other A tier professions when played well. It’s barely in the meta if it even is. Though I don’t think any top team plays a War? I like to play Power War in WvW, but I can think of a quite few other Prof I’d rather have or play on my team than one in Conquest. It isn’t useless, but It doesn’t delete players with F1 either.

When you see a Pro try-hard, the last thing you see them on is a Power Warrior. I’m not saying it isn’t powerful, but it’s not close to the strongest bully on the block in Conquest. And I don’t think anything changed for the good recently for Power Warrior. At least a yr? I’m pretty sure if anything it’s only been nerfed since HoT. I think it’s close to the least of pvp’s problems atm.

Edited to add Meteor Shower is 1200 range..Almost 3x the range than Arcing Slice. Though making it 400 I’d agree wouldn’t kill the skill. Any more than that would be too much. I mean, they already killed Rifle.

The irony here is that the best build for warrior right now is carrion GS because the damage and cooldown on Arc Divider is so high/low respectively even the condi build does a massive amount of damage with it, and gets tons of free utility when running Defense.

Skullgrinder and the CC spam with three invulns the best healing in the game from Adrenal Health, massive resistance uptime and extended blocking uptime makes the condi variant just overly-excessive.

Remove the confusion and blind on Skullgrinder, reduce the radius on Arc Divider, put Defy Pain on a 25% threshhold to let the build get bursted, and massively nerf Adrenal Health, and the build becomes much more stable.

DH needs similar treatment with its blocks and heals as well, however.

There’s currently nothing skillful about the activation. It’s punishing for no reason. Pin-down-style? Sure, as I’d have no problems with that. But as it currently is the only way out is stability. The advice about a thief evading out of range is just honestly terrible and comes down to the DH not knowing when/how to use a pull/wings to make sure it lands, and stunbreaks are unreliable since the skill launches unpredictably, and in many cases even when on flat terrain (I got launched 1800+ into the air yesterday in sPvP while fighting in the center of mid while being at < 500 range on Foefire and died while at 90% hp from just fall damage alone). It travels faster than every projectile in the game from a strictly felocity perspective (including RTW ranger longbow shots) with a smaller tell than all others due to the lack of full-body windup/tempo animations that come with the rest.

Malediktus.9250:

Neftex.7594:

you seem to be missing the point malediktus, hes using alt account to show everyone that good players wont stay stuck at low mmr and so far hes successful.
obviously he cant win every match

So if the world champion (using an overpowered condi mesmer build, too) cannot win every match in bronze to silver, how is lets say someone worth gold division supposed to climb out of bronze/silver? This just proves that there are a lot of matches where it is impossible to win no matter how good you are and how much effort you put in.

My MMR is still changing +-100 every day after over 300 matches, I do not see any settlement effect yet.

I’ve found time of day matters a lot.

Early afternoon NA EST (EU prime) is a pubstomp if you’re good. I almost just one-shotted an entire division in a day, consistently carrying outnumbered on-point fights with a power necro and thief lol.

As soon as it starts hitting the evening hours, matches start to swing wildly and the matches seem to be all randomness. After going 13-2 in the afternoon and taking a break, I’m 1-11 in evening games.

As I’ve said above, though, this whole thread/what Helseth is even doing is kind of flawed and not even necessarily applicable to NA.

Offair.2563:

In my opinion teef is hands down the worst implemented class i ever seen in an MMO. And please don’t take this too personally teef players.

It’s a worst-best and a best-worst. Take out the cheese and stealth-stacking, and mechanically/balance-wise the profession is probably the best-designed in the game. Aside from the bogus stuff, every thief build out there (and even including some bogus stuff) makes pretty major tradeoffs for damage/defense and so on. There’s no build that “has it all” – and that’s why it’s not seen as particularly OP as a profession in general.

The problem is that none of the other professions are that well-implemented and as such the cheese is required to keep the profession even halfway viable.

So unless ANet plans to

- Nerf/remove the rest of the dumb mechanics on all professions in the game

and

- Nerf/remove the thief’s cheese and poorly (and I mean very poorly-designed elements) as well

and

- Buff the thief in areas it needs it which to not stem from abusive chains/spam

and

- Do all of this perfectly without balance disparities and be willing to take the flak from PvE players.

Nothing will ever change.

The same is said for mesmers, too, though it’s not as significant.

Another amazing game at the time with a lot of innovative skills and the likes that made PvP awesome. There’s a fan-made private server floating around now I believe.

There was a lot of amazing experimentation with large-scale PvP in that period. The games are now pretty much all dated and dead at this point, but it was a great era to be part of in games.

I’m hoping another wave from other studios pushes this envelope more in the next few years; the scene right now is extremely stale.

ArchonWing.9480:

Wonder if not rendering all those enemy minis would help…

Rendering wouldn’t mean anything. It’s keeping track of their positions/firing idles/etc. that would take some resources.

It pales in comparions to the effect of the proc-spam/low-cooldown facerolling that happens in fights now, though.

I only went core D/D for a few games because the matchup volatility was so bad it didn’t matter what I played (I played meta Daredevil for almost 50 games and a lot of the teams were just so bad I couldn’t carry because my point-fight presence wasn’t good enough); I actually ended up winning more straight games on my “troll” build than I did on meta Daredevil just because of how the cards fell by luck on teammates – and my gains were more substantial since I was consistently getting multiple top stats due to the damage it pumps out, which the decap role doesn’t really reward at all. I’m back to power reaper and things are sailing much smoother now as people fall into the tiers they belong in and I’m in a position to actually hold points, and figure once I start pushing the build to its limits in the plat area where I can no longer carry fights on my own, I’ll probably go back to playing the meta Daredevil as I can then trust my teammates to not stand off-point, win a few fights to make decaps meaningful, and the likes.

You need to use its strengths appropriately and have another weapon to catch mobile professions. I run Spite/SR/R GS + A/D on my power reaper and find myself carrying a majority of the fights that happen. That said, you can’t treat GS as a primary weapon because it’s too slow to be universally good; you need something to fill its weaknesses, or otherwise yes, it is not a good weapon to use at all. If you fill its weaknesses and switch weapons/shroud properly, you’ll find it has amazing utility.

GS excels when engaging a point and subsequently fighting on it with another (or especially multiple) melee players, and not so much because you can keep it out and keep hitting people with it, but because its first few seconds of skill use are extremely impactful and create a great setup for the rest of your kit. I like to approach with A/D, if nobody is dead or low, engage and move in while casting Axe 2, mass corrupt with Axe 3 and Dagger 5, and then by the time I’m on the point, interrupt the whole set of enemies with GS 5, apply a blind field via GS4, vuln and LF generation on CC’ed targets with GS3, and move into shroud to whirl the field and deal tons of damage to boon-corrupted, vuln-stacked enemies. Interrupt heals/resses with Executioner’s Scythe/CTTB, and cleave downs/ressers with gravedigger resets.

That, or ignore the setup and rush into the fight with GS5 to interrupt stomps or channels if things on-point look bleak. It all kind of depends on what’s happening.

I like having A/D as my alternate set because the damage and burst LF gain is good, it has a transfer on skill 4 like staff, runs double AoE corruption, and most significantly lets you kill thieves with GC. The GC channel tracks stealth and does a huge amount of damage, and a CoD proc will eat up the thief’s three boons gained from their ToTC and the two effects combined will usually down a thief that doesn’t shadowstep into the distance. The plus side is that your cooldown here is 8s; their essential one is 50.

The bottom line is that you can’t think of gravedigger as good. It’s far too clunky to use very often unless you have nothing better to do, and even then, I only recommend trying for it when running Signet of the Locust to increase your in-combat speed and land it with a degree of reliability. GS AA’s 1 and 2 do plenty of damage and have much better hitboxes/reliability for the most part. If you burn your cooldowns, you should for the most part be using shroud or A/D.

D4 and Suffer should handle most of your cleansing needs. If against an excess of DH’s/block-heavy builds like mesmer and warrior, I also recommend switching out of SotL and going NCSY for the extra corrupt + unblockable attacks. An unprepared DH will be one-shotted via Soul Spiral with a good NCSY because their block chains are simply invalidated and they’ll likely hit a max-damage-proc of Chill of Death.

If you learn to really utilize the awkward timing on GS you can make some amazing plays with it. While I think Dagger is the better power weapon in general, I’d put GS up there as a viable alternative with excellent group/fight utility. I think too many people get absorbed with camping it and are not using shroud/rotating weapons, though, and that’s why they think it’s worse than it really is.

Agreed. The entire concept of a stealth sniper is strictly terrible design. You want range? You need it in another form with much more visibility. I don’t like GF berserker for this reason, as a skin can hide all visible tells on its burst.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if ANet did it because their track record right now is so bad anything is possible lol.

LetoII.3782:

DeceiverX.8361:

DH:
Valor – Passive Aegis, Condi removal (meditation), aegis and block reset on heal, AoE bonus toughness, block synergy, healing on meditations.
DH- AoE slow on trap, passive AoE Aegis, condi cleanse.

Most of this is wrong

Taken straight from the highest-ranked condition build for guardian from metabattle.

The thing is, weakness is a very strong effect and most of the control conditions were designed to never be under the effect of duration increases of this magnitude. It’s why there aren’t runes and sigils to extend durations and the likes. Weakness is a 50% power damage cut and a huge evasion cut. Allowing for that to just be permanent while having huge condition burst and breadth does the exact opposite of what is intended for conditions to do; if permanent weakness was to be an innate part of the kit and designed in such a way to make it rather difficult to maintain (like on S/x thief), then things end up a lot better. That’s what I mean by a re-addressing of durations; in most cases, things could have just been buffed and we wouldn’t need to deal with the difference of conditions when being modified by massive duration boosts versus a lack of them. Consolidating them would also prevent power builds from having much access to begin with as to provide condition builds with distinct advantages. The tick time is really insignificant if people are cleansing so much as you claim they are, anyways, and a power build will have very low tick damage. If conditions as a whole played more like burn DH, I don’t see how there’s an inherent problem. There’s a lot of application of one condition and the tools (if not excessive at the moment) to keep them going out and staying alive. A build running multiple small cleanses (to sustain against a DoT build as it should be) should have a better chance just as how someone having a shield and huge damage reduction effects stacked up tries to sustain against power.

I’d go as far to say that Unload is a relatively poor example to use; it’s the hardest-hitting ability on the potentially hardest-hitting class in the game, and you assume the full channel is landing every time despite the obvious choreography. As for conditions on AA, I personally don’t have a problem with it – but comparing it to dagger and staff AA is a problem – again, these are the two hands-down best AA chains in the game. I don’t know of a single person with a reasonable head on their shoulders who thinks the AA buff to thief has been a good idea in general.

The problem with the problematic builds right now is the builds push out conditions too quickly and push out too many conditions while also being heavily defensively-oriented as DoT builds in GW2 are supposed to. In a lot of cases, there aren’t enough cleanses in the game except on a few select builds to deal with the raw applicability of conditions as they are, and with dire/tb stats and defensive kits, power builds can’t crank out enough damage to get the kill before they would also down/die, because the stats on dire and TB are full-tank.

As far as being “up close and personal” that’s entirely a build/profession thing with very heavy bias towards the thief on P/D. I do encourage you to try and get “up close and personal” with a macebow berserker, condi bomb shroud reaper, melee trapper condi ranger, burn guard, condi DH, P/P blowtorch engi, M/A condi rev, … the list just keeps going. Most of these builds actually favor power matchups because they have massive power damage negation and run limited cleansing themselves.

One of the problems the community of condition players doesn’t really seem to be able to come to terms with is the simple fact that the underlying principles for condition damage in GW2 are not designed around burst or even massive sustained damage/DPS like DoT-stacking is in most games. It’s meant to offer a style of play which chips away at the opponent, keeps them in combat, and has synergy with control and defense-oriented builds. That’s mechanically why the DoT here ignores armor, and why power builds as intended are supposed to deal more damage and have three stats for offense instead of one/two. If people can’t come to terms with that, there’s no helping them. They’d have to strike up a conversation with the developers themselves and convince them to change the foundation of how DoT and condition damage in their game works. As it is the entire dynamic is broken and can’t support many different types of changes.

And the chances they stay at the top with the decay are very low.

What’s really going to happen is the final day of the season will see the rise of a ton of 10-0 accounts taking all the top spots lol.

Sent you a message with some contact info.

It’s not that winning is meaningless; it’s been meaningless since day 1 and people are totally fine with pouring thousands of gold into it, anyways.

The problem is that the fights are meaningless. HoT balance is so bad and the professions so terribly-designed at this point that the very act of playing WvW feels meaningless because engaging in combat is no longer fun.

That’s what’s driving people away, and why the GvG scene is dead. Bottom line, professions need BIG changes for this format to ever stabilize.

I only know of one: White Lotus of the Mists on TC (NA). While not all AUS, they have a pretty strong presence in that zone and they’re an amazing group of people to play with from a personality POV. They’ll help you get better without much criticism at all so long as you’re willing to listen and work with them. If I join TS, it’s to follow Kin because he’s such a great guy.

Clownmug.8357:

I think if anything is ever done to balance conditions it should be something simple, like capping duration to +50% and/or only a maximum of 5 stacks per condition against player characters.

Frankly I don’t think Expertise should have been added; I think conditions as a whole should have had their durations re-addressed instead.

They wouldn’t really need to worry about stack capping if the professions just had less breadth available to them. Cutting down the mass breadth of application would allow one three-condi cleanse to nullify the immediate application of two people ganking or something, just like how an invuln or block negates the subsequent actual killing hits a power build would hinge on after the first assault.

This also lets single-condition cleanses have appropriate strength in duels, allows for revision of group/mass cleanses, and makes conditions in general scale better in both smaller and larger groups as a consequence.

Granted, I don’t ever see this happening because the whining would be immense.

apharma.3741:

You’ve seen the people in bronze, they are absurdly terrible and these potatoes on your team are likely to be on the other team. If you can’t achieve more than a 50% win rate vs potatoes then you are a potato. I mean they were even stood in the middle of the map having a blooming dance party because it never occured to them what the fluff they should do.

To be clear, people in bronze generally don’t understand skills, blocks, dodges, rotations or anything of the like, it’s been shown on videos and if you cannot win 1v2 against people who mash buttons in no particular order well you are not worthy of progressing. Warrior absolutely destroys people like that, if you have trouble in bronze pick up a warrior and carry like a pack mule on steroids, you’ll be roflstomping them.

Silver you may have to think about what you do and your team but anyone who is mechanically decent with a carry class should progress even slowly. I’m looking forward to seeing what silver is like on stream.

I have to say I think him not just one-shotting legend kind of has a bias, though. As time goes by, people get filtered closer towards the tiers they belong in. My games in silver at the very beginning of the season had players from diamond and low bronze who got lucky in placement games because of those players who carried them. Silver towards the 1200-1250 range a week ago was absolutely ELO hell; there were games where I consistently saw people not even capping neutral uncontested points, sitting around AA’ing the air, etc. while opponents who belong in gold+ were just doing generally well, and when on the unlucky side, those are just the kinds of games you lose; you don’t 1v4 and win against players who belong in higher divisions unless you’re playing something blatantly overpowered; hell, even I’ve won 1v4’s against people in silver when playing core D/D power thief, just because they didn’t belong in the game/tier. Helseth is an amazing mesmer but his method of experimentation isn’t really sound, nor is this topic in general.

So as the baddies get filtered out, he’ll be able to carry himself better, so it doesn’t really prove much. Basically, him taking it slowly avoids the whole “ELO hell” thing.

Does ELO hell exist? Sort of. It does at the beginning of the season where people are all over the place in ranks they don’t belong, and matches are determined by RNG, and it can depending on the class/build you’re playing in respects to how reliable your teammates are. If you’re an excellent support it doesn’t really matter how good you are if your teammates don’t understand the basics of combat. It also depends on the scope of the game. GW2’s PvP scene is very small. People will filter out faster as a consequence. In massive games like League, you can have a new influx of players at a given rank pretty much every day, constantly upsetting this process. The existence of ELO hell will therefore be more persistent.

So making blanket statements like it does/doesn’t exist – and really the method of this experimentation – is kind of based entirely on flawed logic.

Gwaihir.1745:

Inb4 someone qqing about DH stacking being op.

Oh it definitely is. The only reason this was allowed to happen was because of the fact that nobody had a DH lol. Just coincidence led to people playing the game for giggles because they didn’t feel a need to go full-tryhard because of it.

CAN I GET A THIRTY MINIONS ON MID? THIRTY ONE? GOING TWICE?

We started with six split evenly. We ended up with eight necros total. D/C’ed guy in fact switched.

Despite the fact we lost terribly because the thief went full tryhard for every cap possible (lame), this was genuinely one of the most fun games I’ve ever had. I commend those on my team for taking the loss at select and the opposing necros for having so much fun with it, and for the rev despite not having a necro diving every fight at mid for luls.

Nobody AFK’ing, everyone knew the rules and how to play, nobody tryharding into the meta (with the exception of some who wouldn’t switch cough), this was just downright fun and totally silly.

Happy New Year’s

HoT powercreep is a myth you have no idea what you’re talking about. Clearly it’s all in your head that it’s too easy because you’re just amazing at the game.

/s

Which is in essence the big problem. As it stands, conditions offer huge burst damage potential with relative ease of application/reliability and much more difficult-to-achieve counters than power damage in most cases.

More weapon skills and professions need to consolidate the number of conditions which can be applied at a given time, similarly to how the guardian works in that it only DoT’s on burning. Professions shouldn’t be slinging four of five different types of conditions per second (like how the thief and mesmer can) while running durable stats, high stack-counts of DoT effects, and solid control via covers like Weakness and Blind.

Westenev.5289:

As a person who plays thief often, I suggest going glassy to begin with (zerk/scholar) – thief has a lot of evades and manoeuvrability to survive, and you can’t learn to take full advantage of them if you’re under the assumption you can take a hit without consequences. Developing a healthy paranoia is the key to staying alive – especially in a meta that is so anti-thief.

Pretty much this. If you want to improve, you’re gonna have to suck and just get better.

There are so many nuances depending on each weapon set that I don’t even know where to begin. Again, this is kind of a practice thing.

The best place to start in PvP environments is to learn how the other professions work so you know how to beat them. The thief requires the most knowledge of its opponents as well as a high degree of mechanical skill compared to the rest of the professions. Not knowing what to expect will get you killed and make you frustrated, regardless of how good mechanically you are.

No, it’s got nothing to do with the servers.

It’s about the profession balance.

HoT kills off small guilds with locking WvW upgrades behind huge gold gates, causing a lot of active non-blob players to leave the game.

Plus

HoT/Elite spec design reigns supreme and blatantly overpowered with unfun mechanics -> small-scale scene dies from lack of interest from those who remained.

Therefore:

Those entering WvW maps are going to be inherently blob-focused since the incentive to perform in small-scale is no longer there.

Consequently, as explained by an ANet programmer on reddit some time ago (without stating the real cause of it coming from changes to profession design):

Bigger, blobbier zergs all running an increase of passives, proc effects, and the likes which killed off small-scale and distributed the number of players on the map causes huge propagation of events to fire server-side every time blobs engage. Passive traits are interacting with passive traits which proc others’ passive traits which proc an effect and so on for each individual player. All of this data is loaded into a queue for processing meanwhile due to all the power creep via such low cooldowns things just keep happening while the servers try to handle all the raised events and interrupts.

Basically, if we just deleted HoT/current elite spec design the problem would largely go away. And while I think people would love to kill off the lag, playing without elites is nigh impossible when trying to win.

Until the profession team gets its **** together and designs things in a not-terrible way such that there are no system slowdowns due to event propagation coming from passives, it’ll never be solved.

Gwaihir.1745:

DeceiverX.8361:

Rhego.6590:

What?? Why are we talking about builds lol… I asked which server will be best for finding fights..

You asked for zerg-busting, not zerging. Those are two very different things, and the former depends heavily on the meta. Right now, there is no countering the existing meta with fewer players pretty much regardless of how good you actually are. The professions have been changed in ways where zerg-busting (a build-dependent area of the game) no longer exists, because there’s currently no way to shut down larger groups of players without just having more numbers, because the dominant builds do not have any means of getting shut down.

That still was never requested nor brought up. And self supportive teams can still take down larger groups, ZEN on eu I think has some good vids up. Heck me and 2 of my friends mesing around contested an ebg keep and sat on the spawn killing them as they rolled in until around 12-14 guys had showed up. Was fun, messing around in completely off the meta builds but people who know how to play together are still stronger.

I gave an answer and got criticized for saying none because the game-state doesn’t allow for what the OP wants right now. Would you lie or give a bad answer to someone who came in asking about a frontline-one-push thief build for T1 zerg fights rather than saying there is none?

Killing 14 unorganized pugs (probably with blob-oriented builds) at spawn is not zerg busting. A zerg these days pushes closer to 30-50 in most tiers in NA.

Nope. Without negative feedback, there’s no room to improve or fix any problems. Those who get up and silently leave cause lost revenue, and those who cover up the truth do just as much or more damage to the company long-term as they’ll think they’re doing fine or that the decay isn’t pertinent to any action they’ve taken.

There’s pretty much nothing to appreciate except for skirmishes. Too bad the act of skirmishing (fighting itself) isn’t actually any fun.

So long as the profession design in this game is terrible, people will complain; as will I.

The WvW team needs to do very little except for some population/matchmaking tweaks. Fact is, the act of fighting itself isn’t fun anymore, so even if they do fix the problems mentioned above, it won’t mean anything.

Rhego.6590:

What?? Why are we talking about builds lol… I asked which server will be best for finding fights..

You asked for zerg-busting, not zerging. Those are two very different things, and the former depends heavily on the meta. Right now, there is no countering the existing meta with fewer players pretty much regardless of how good you actually are. The professions have been changed in ways where zerg-busting (a build-dependent area of the game) no longer exists, because there’s currently no way to shut down larger groups of players without just having more numbers, because the dominant builds do not have any means of getting shut down.

- Get rid of Dire/TB.
- Rework some kits to provide less breadth of conditions/condition overloading which prevent well-balanced builds from keeping up to a reasonable degree without resistance or spammable mass-cleanses (hint: that’s only a few builds).
- Increase condition potency of builds stacking fewer conditions to maintain or even increase their damage potential on targets which do not cleanse but also increasing the value of using cleanses properly.
- Add more cleansing options to more builds; half the problem is conditions are countered more/less based on trait selection.
- Nerf resistance uptime/durations and all boon access in general.
- Reduce the amount of CC (hard and soft)
- Reduce the amount of spammable condition access occurring during defensive moves (burn on block for guard, thief damaging during evasion, massive damage from berserker during EP/DP, chronos applying conditions during stealth, etc. and move this to active play options via improved weapon skills.

Not really any tbh. Gameplay is so passive and the strong builds/builds being played are so much better than the rest that there’s really no way to do it anymore.

Ballads.2509:

DeceiverX.8361:

Kamara.4187:

Balance is an issue period and needs to be considered across the board. Dire on a condi mesmer is not an issue unless a player hasn’t learned to target the main instead of a clone.

Lolwat.

This build has literally been widely-considered as by-far-and-large the single most overpowered small-scale build in the entire game even before HoT where it got even more boosted. At one point there was a video posted of a guy literally facerolling his keyboard and winning fights with it.

Condi mesmer when in non-tank armor isn’t inherently OP at all. The problem is when it runs so much durability and has so much immunity uptime, it doesn’t allow players windows of opportunity to punish the mesmer back. This is especially apparent on Chrono.

If they got rid of dire/TB entirely we’d see relative balance in condition builds; a major problem is that almost all condition damage trait lines are defensive because originally condition damage as a stat didn’t exist and was meant as a source of small damage for tanks to deal on builds with heavier condition access (which is why it ignores all armor).

Just No, no and No. Stop making stuff up to support your theory.

Go back to 2013-era threads. The PU condi roamer you see in the roaming meta is literally the same build, and has not once changed. The chronomancer version obviously makes some changes but it’s very similar in concept.

As far as condition builds running defensive lines…
Mesmer:
Dueling – Mixed and replaced with chrono on its variant; 2/3 of selected traits are defensive in nature.
Illusions – The condi cleanse and utility line required by all builds.
Chaos – All defense. Passive regen, projectile hate, passive prot/prot, prot on weapon skill use, boon duration, defensive boon access for camping stealth.

Ranger:
BM/Druid/NM – I don’t even think an explanation is needed – it’s all defense.

Berserker:
Defense – Self-explanatory
Discipline – immob cleanses, grouped condition cleanse utility, adrenal health synergy.
Berserker – DoA/EC, formerly Tactics which increased toughness, healing power, healing on shouts.

Thief:
Acrobatics – THE defensive line
Trickery – Required utiltiy line for all builds, Uncatchable for aoe cripple on dodge, vigor on steal.
Daredevil – All defensive: Increased defensive utility uptime and endurance gain, heal on dodge, cleanse on dodge, endurance on steal, immune to movement conditions or condition damage on dodge

DH:
Valor – Passive Aegis, Condi removal (meditation), aegis and block reset on heal, AoE bonus toughness, block synergy, healing on meditations.
DH- AoE slow on trap, passive AoE Aegis, condi cleanse.

Ele:
I mean, enough said.

Scrapper:
Alchemy – Passive Elixir B, passive prot on CC, passive conditions to boons, passive elixir S, condi removal on elixirs and boon duration.
Scrapper – Prot on heal, superspeed on revive, healing when mobile, CC duration reduction, stacking toughness and reduced incoming condition damage bonus.

Necro/reaper is the most offensively-oriented, granted it runs shroud which innately scales best from tankier stats anyways…

Rev:
Mallyx – A given/requirement to deal damage, lots and lots of resistance.
Retribution – Passive Endurance gains, DR from ranged attacks, stab on evade, passive Taunt and prot on CC, DR below 75% hp, passive 50% DR when below half.
Herald – Convert damage to healing, endurance regeneration, boon duration, extra stability.

Almost all of these run more passives, defensive lines, etc. than their power variants. Especially true on Mesmer/thief.

As far as history of the game goes, this is just fact: condition damage was originally not a stat on any armor combination. Like there’s no point in arguing because that’s literally how the game was made in terms of the old trait configurations and some since-yet-changed weapon skill designs.

Jim Hunter.6821:

DeceiverX.8361:

The “roaming” crew has boiled down mostly to unskilled gankers running FoTM builds in “skilled” guilds pretending they’re as good as that guy they saw on youtube three years ago. Since thieves typically can’t run in blobs and a lot of the mechanics underlying the FoTM builds are just unfun for the opponent/trolly, this is the result you get.

So yea it’ll bring a lot of toxicity when they can’t win, or they think they’re amazing and the best thief ever when they do.

^Pretty much that.
There is a pretty good percentage of players just looking for the easiest/cheesiest win. Before the last round of druid nerfs I was getting the most rage whispers from them because there were so many fotm players that expected the build to hard carry their lack of skill and understanding of the class.
I bet a lot of those players swapped to thief after the nerf because even though thief might not be the best for 1v1’s it is still the best for running if they get into trouble. If you manage to lock them down and kill them they tend to qq.

Funny enough but the last salty whisper I got was from a ghost thief running with 2 other ghost thieves. He called my p/p engi cheesy after I revealed and killed all 3 of them when they tried to jump me. Perfect example of players that snagged a brain dead build off youtube expecting it to carry them.

I’d say it’s probably a majority of players these days. It’s quite rare when I encounter someone who isn’t running the FoTM cheese, and typically those who aren’t are just better people. Sad to say, a lot of people looking for genuinely good fights (even if losing) left the game entirely with HoT.

I will say that the druid’s celestial sustain before its nerfs were out of line even coming from non-meta builds. It’s counters were largely off-meta, but it did counter most of that space as well. Put simply, six consecutive full-combos (from me, which means on anyone else 200k+ damage) which would out-damage the sustain of even the old D/D ele was making barely any scratches. They really do need to do something about core ranger, though I think this can be said about the relationship between most elite specs and their respective core ones.

I’m not even so sure so many switched to explicitly thief (probably many current ghost thieves did), as Berserker, burn guard, and condi mesmer play has been steadily increasing as well, and frankly, those aren’t too skill-intensive, either.

o.o either the thieves you fight are terrible or you just haven’t fought very many… because it’s literally the only thing that lets them have a chance against condi mes, and has a heavy impact against power.

Kamara.4187:

Balance is an issue period and needs to be considered across the board. Dire on a condi mesmer is not an issue unless a player hasn’t learned to target the main instead of a clone.

Lolwat.

This build has literally been widely-considered as by-far-and-large the single most overpowered small-scale build in the entire game even before HoT where it got even more boosted. At one point there was a video posted of a guy literally facerolling his keyboard and winning fights with it.

Condi mesmer when in non-tank armor isn’t inherently OP at all. The problem is when it runs so much durability and has so much immunity uptime, it doesn’t allow players windows of opportunity to punish the mesmer back. This is especially apparent on Chrono.

If they got rid of dire/TB entirely we’d see relative balance in condition builds; a major problem is that almost all condition damage trait lines are defensive because originally condition damage as a stat didn’t exist and was meant as a source of small damage for tanks to deal on builds with heavier condition access (which is why it ignores all armor).

The “roaming” crew has boiled down mostly to unskilled gankers running FoTM builds in “skilled” guilds pretending they’re as good as that guy they saw on youtube three years ago. Since thieves typically can’t run in blobs and a lot of the mechanics underlying the FoTM builds are just unfun for the opponent/trolly, this is the result you get.

So yea it’ll bring a lot of toxicity when they can’t win, or they think they’re amazing and the best thief ever when they do.

I only had one game in gold after placement before losing it – and it was a good game, actually.

I’ve just learned that silver is hell and all the matches pretty much come down to team comp RNG or people who literally do not know how to play the game. I’m no longer taking the format seriously because the “class balance” is so pitiful that wins are decided before the game even starts 90% of the time.

To the list of ridiculous things, in silver 3, add two glass cannon pewpew rangers standing off-point on ledges the entire game and refusing to cap (after I had to decap) uncontested points. We lost 15 to 500 because they wouldn’t get off the ledges and would die, then respawn and go back to the ledges.

msalakka.4653:

The fact that the game mode isn’t doing well has a little to do with the braindead additions they have made to it, but that’s not really the biggest issue. People keep talking about new maps, new rewards, new this, new that.

None of that matters if the fights are not fun.

The leader of my havoc guild used to make really cool videos from WvW footage, showcasing guilds on our server and so on. She recently came back and wanted to record fights and make new videos. What she found, however, is that the footage was boring as hell because the fights were boring as hell.

There is no balance, no diversity. It’s all particle showers and skill spam. Use whatever is off cooldown and let your passives take care of the rest. There is no push and pull, none of that “he used X so I’ll use Y”. There are no turtle guards who sacrifice damage for survival, instead there’s DH that has both. Or Daredevil. Or Scrapper. Or Berserker. Block block block evade evade evade invuln invuln invuln. 8k, 9k, 12k crits per skill.

WvW is all about the fights. The objectives, the map design, it’s all there to encourage encounters with the enemy. So when the experience of those encounters is nothing but the same condi-passive-block bullcrap over and over and over, is it no wonder that people leave?

The solution lies not with the WvW team, but with the apparently non-existent balance one.

+1, and something major players (when they have been leaving) keep saying.

Almost all of GW2’s existing problems can be traced to objectively terrible profession design. ANet’s not willing to own up to it is the saddest part.

Incoming condition application breaking stealth would literally ruin the profession. There’s far too much AoE as it is just for the purpose of combat alone.

Stealth stacking should never have existed to begin with – a la mesmer, trapper runes, sneak gyro, etc., but ANet refuses to do anything about problem-child design cases and will just perform numbers tweaks or add/remove ICD’s to things to try and cover symptoms or make it seem like they “don’t want to drastically change anything” for the toxic people who support these prior bad decisions.

What’s funny is that the same build playing D/P and P/P with Daredevil over DA does more damage, faster, more consistently, and with a much safer engage/disengage.

Why anyone would waste their time on D/D power these days aside from strict and arbitrary loyalty is beyond me.

Again, the I ask of those who think it’s excessive to do anything but bomb random stray pugs/terrible players or gank. The build becomes absolute trash in any scenario with a half-competent enemy.

BG with the best guilds?

Solid chuckle 5/7 lol.

Asahi.1487:

LOL ok since no1 believes this. I went and tried it out.
This build is so easy, a monkey can play it. I hit more than 22k on a guardian on my first couple tries. Removed rage pm from victim, but WOW the hardest thing on this build is to hit 2 buttons at once!

http://imgur.com/fDDftSP

Nerf plz!

Now play it when the opponent catches you off-guard.

Not so easy now, eh?

Asahi.1487:

LOL ok since no1 believes this. I went and tried it out.
This build is so easy, a monkey can play it. I hit more than 22k on a guardian on my first couple tries. Removed rage pm from victim, but WOW the hardest thing on this build is to hit 2 buttons at once!

http://imgur.com/fDDftSP

Nerf plz!

Now play it when the opponent catches you off-guard.

Not so easy now, eh?

Trajan.4953:

jamesdolla.3954:

You think a 2-1-1 scoring system will kill wvw? i’m more concerned about the lack of fights in wvw and lack of growth(guilds,commanders etc) ppt is all about holding stuff and that’s not fun. Should be about epic fights.

Well “Lack of growth” is really all the players fault TBH. There is almost no point in new guilds because the Blob play mentality is all the rage and the new Pin Snipe fad quickly discourages anybody new from tagging up. This is not A-Nets fault.

The entire havoc scene died solely because of what was changed/released with HoT, and the organized havoc scene directly countered the entire incentive/success of omniblobbing. No havoc? Omniblob becomes the absolute best way to play WvW. This is nothing and and has been known for years. That’s why people ran havoc groups to begin with.

It’s not a player problem when literally the only reasonable thing left to do is to blob because all elements of small-group and highly-coordinated gameplay were systematically destroyed at every possible turn.

Fact is, if ANet didn’t want this, they’re absolutely abysmal content designers and their departments don’t communicate about anything, nor is their QA process any good. The effects of HoT on WvW were correctly predicted even before the release of the expansion by our very own community leaders and class theorycrafters.

CS does marginally more damage per hit, but DA provides way more utility via on-steal weakness and poison, good damage on Mug, and a pretty persistent 10% damage modifier. It’s worth noting that ferocity gains are less-substantial nce they’re additive rather than multiplicative (when at at 200% critical damage, a 10% damage modifier = 300 ferocity).

Should have probably looked for more opportunities to decap their home instead of fighting on point.

Granted, there wasn’t really much to go by here considering we have no idea whether or not they were defending home much and the enemy team really wasn’t good enough to make you incapable of on-point fighting.

Prices are up because supply is low and the demand is the same.

As mentioned, most people didn’t really use them for anything, so after accumulating a lot and maybe finding an item they really wanted, they’d sell a bunch.

The problem is the fact that the number of coins entering the game has dropped because the number of people playing – and selling – has also drastically dropped.

You may say it’s because people have been hoarding them because of the price rises, but quite frankly, there are so many people out there who need/want the cash and don’t use the coins that the stock shouldn’t be changing at all.

Guild halls set the hurdle high and they consumed tons of them. People didn’t stay to keep stocks replenishing, though. It’s the same with charged crystals/ambrite; they were absolutely dirt cheap when people farmed the SW.

The way I see it, the Mystic Coin fiasco is the most telling way economically how rapidly the active playing population has plummeted since the expansion.

For D/C’s, yes, and this is just something recent that ANet has no control over. The skill lag dating back for roughly a year now is almost solely due to the ways the game has changed in terms of the amount of events happening server-side.

On a side note, this topic was originally made in the WvW section, so “raids” in the context of the OP mean WvW raids, not PvE.