Guild Wars 2

zinkz.7045:

jcbroe.4329:

I adamantly insist to my guild leader that he kick all Rangers/Druids from squad.

Which is rather short sighted, poor man management and generally counter-productive, much better to kick rangers/thieves when the squad reaches 50, with “A sorry rangers, gotta make room in the squad for these guards, etc”.

The outcome of which, to take a couple of people I know who played ranger, when the a commander who didn’t whine about rangers, thieves, etc or immediately kick them (though I am sure like every other commander he’d of preferred other classes) was having tough fights, those players would often log another class to help out, where as the commanders who whined about rangers/thieves, kicked instantly, got a "kitten you " attitude back in return and no re-logging on to another class.

While I agree more with this mentality as a means to approach raiding (I was kicked for just telling the GM of a guild that rangers would probably see use in commander sniping immediately after the CDI – and I was correct), this was addressed in his post sublty in the sense that you do not join a WvW raiding guild and then play a ranger. If you get an invite and people are otherwise fine with you playing it – I.E. you earned that right by clearly demonstrating a massive proficiency with the class (as jc did on his ranger and as I have done on my thief) – that’s when you might get the all-clear from leaders. Nobody’s entitled to tell a raiding guild how it should run its groups except for its leaders. There are some guilds where anything but a very specific comp will be a liability. This gets more and more strict as the fights get bigger and the guild gets outnumbered.

As I said initially, a lot of rangers don’t even know they’re being liabilities or refuse to accept that fact. Longbow pew pew in a large group, especially coming from PvE, has the lowest skill floor in the game. There are a lot of rangers that haven’t gotten past the open-world mentality of just unloading at a distance, and that lack of understanding gets large numbers of people killed in WvW. The commanders know when a player is good on a ranger, thief, or anything, really so long as you’re visible, but they can easily check their damage logs to know precisely when someone isn’t good and hurting the group, and it’s the easiest to determine it as a ranger, because not many professions are so capable of killing their own allies while having that damage recorded in logs.

Please, no. The omniblob is already bad enough.

Carighan.6758:

Fay.2357:

And you’re trying to argue that downed state is valuable in PvE because…reasons?

Lets face it, if you get downed in PvE, you’re either bad or in a situation where your downed skills don’t matter because your team should be reviving you. Downed state only matters for PvP, and mesmer downed state 2 is absolute top tier for PvP.

I wish we had numbers for this. I have a slight suspicion that if you were to sum up the amount of times players get downed and up from downed state, PvE might show it’s rather important there.

Yes, it might be your opinion that it only matters for bad players. They should “gitgud”. Thing is, “you’re not capping your player skill yet” is not really an excuse to have skills with crappy mechanics. It’s alright to have skills with complex mechanics if you want some specifically to provide a higher skill ceiling.

Versus what? A simple count is arbitrary and meaningless.
I have a slight suspicion that if you were to sum up the number of avoided spikes and rallies by each profession in PvP environments and compared them individually to solo-PvE-play, and then compare that to the number of play-hours on each profession, the percentage of saves from the ability in PvP environments would massively overshadow the PvE ones.

TBTH, the mesmer’s downed state in general is quite good, even in PvE. The AA is one of the highest-scaling downed-state abilities. Stealth and teleport on downed is amazing to regen some health and avoid getting stomped/damaged/cleaved. The rogue on a power build should finish or one-shot open-world mobs because it does more damage than backstab.

It’s not a bad mechanic, either. The teleport isn’t totally random.

Honestly, I think the only professions better off in downed state in PvE are the necromancer and guardian, and both of those are definitively weaker in the PvP environments unless you get lucky on your opponent having no stability and/or low health (necro downed state against low hp target is definitely the best downed state when in this environment), and neither professions have good mobility or ranged options and are going to be more inclined to go down.

Plus, I mean, it’s downed state in PvE. It doesn’t even matter if you reach the skill cap or not. If you’re dying in PvE, there’s a good reason for it: either the downed state isn’t to blame because you went down to begin with against something you should have otherwise beaten, or you bit off way more than you can chew and either need to get better at the class while alive to beat it, or you just had no chance of winning, anyways, so there’s no sense in complaining. Or, you’re in a group environment, and the mesmer downed state is one of the best ones when there are some people nearby to res.

Should probably specify DPS as burst.

That said, Xy’s kind of right.

Can’t have huge innate burst and control on shatters + amazing group utility on build and traits + high personal DPS.

I think the only real way to get past the issue is the next elite spec to replace shatters with selfish DPS options.

The problem is that the PvE meta will always demand roles, and those who are most optimal at them. In instances of trying to balance PvE, you either end up with strict role-based systems and pray your class/profession is doing what you like, or you end up with infinite power creep trying to give each profession a reason to be selected.

Both outcomes are terrible and are why fundamentally unless class diversity is strictly not allowed, there’s going to be a demographic screwed over. Which is why generally speaking balancing for diverse groups in high-end PvE is pointless.

Definitely condi. Without permanent resistance there’s no reason not to just run pure dire frontline groups

jcbroe.4329:

Okay, misconceptions. First and foremost; players make the meta, not devs. Also, WvW is all inclusive, ANet has no control over player interaction in that gamemode though, let alone on community sites and VoIP, but you are capable of joining and playing WvW on anything and do anything you want.

Time to educate.

Organized guild groups are all running a boon meta powered by Durability Runes and how insanely OP their AoE proc is alone, on top of what the stats are.

Here’s the bread and butter party composition:

• 2 Guardians
• Glint/Mallyx Herald
• Tempest
• X

Essentially, Heralds maintain F2 and camp Mallyx as much as possible spamming resistance as much as possible. Guardians boon support, cleanses, some heals. Tempest CC, heals, damage. Whole group moves as one with no real concept of a “backline” anymore.

What is X? Reapers, Berserkers, Scrappers, or in rare circumstance Chronomancers. X is looking to maximize damage and unique utility in their position. Reapers are perfect at this role; high damage, can push with group, boon strip. Berserkers are like the harder to kill, higher constant damage version of that role, but don’t bring the strips. Scrapper works very similarly to Berserker but brings much more group utility with AoE heal/cleanse, water fields, gyros, etc. Mesmer is boonshare with veil/portal utility.

Where/how does or would Druid work in this equation? The damage Druid brings is honestly inconsequential at the end of the day (not useless, don’t wet noodle). It ends up having the same fate as chronomancers do; 1 or 2 with the absolutely perfect build and ability can have some useful utility, but stacking more than that is wasting the opportunity value of X’s potential role in party/squad compositions. What you bring as a Druid are CC/Heals and Superspeed (only Tempests and Scrappers can even offer this to party members besides you, it’s important).

You will work your kitten off to earn that spot as X in a party composition, and are a liability if you are costing your group too much damage. A good Druid that can roll with the group can be a valuable asset that assists with tons of sustain and the ability to provide some setup for the rest of the group to dish out damage and possibly add some meaningful cleave every once in awhile (yes you should be staff/melee). A bad Druid thinks their damage is amazing and contributes little to nothing to the team/squad dynamic, which is 99% of the other Druids I come across.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with running damage or LB or whatever else the heart desires. But given what the metagame is, at most you’re ganking for the main squad while the main squad does their thing, and at worst, well, you’re fodder, and a waste of a squad slot for any commander looking to run an organized group and not a pug group (recognize this when you join on commanders, guild groups tend to be very demanding of pugs or unaccepting entirely).

PS as a long time Ranger/Druid main and forum community member, I adamantly insist to my guild leader that he kick all Rangers/Druids from squad. I absolutely partake in the criticisms the community places upon the class, because 99% of the representation the class gets from the ingame population is useless pew pew rallybots.

If you take issue with that, then do what I had to do to earn my place amongst the guild I am in and people I play the game with, accept that skepticism and opinion people have of you being on that class, then go above and beyond what they have come to expect from it and prove them wrong.

PPS I don’t like coming across bad players, but I especially don’t like coming across bad rangers/druids. We wouldn’t have the reputation that people give our class if people didn’t live up to that reputation on a widespread level. Whining and crying about it on the forums won’t change that perspective; playing better and being better will. In the time it takes you to whine that people don’t like what or how you’re playing even though they could definitely be justified in their opinion of your skillset as a player, you could have been improving that skillset, changing peoples opinions, and proving people wrong.

Good to see you post and my initial claims effectively be reiterated entirely.

Everything else on this page made me facepalm. We have claims stating ranger has the best DPS in the game if played well, claims about CoR having weak damage, and people telling prominent players to L2P.

Cynz.9437:

Eval.2371:

Jana.6831:

I started as a clicker and still am running around in blobs. We had a very short time in which the mouse cursor was always centered on the screen – I so wish that was an option.

Uh you do know about action camera right?

Look in your keybinds and the action cam toggle keybind. When active, action cam places a dot in the middle of the screen that is functionally your cursor. When running action cam right click is select/deselect target at the dot. left click is your 1 skill.

I can’t play the game any other way. Mouse wheel click is a perfect place for the toggle imho. Hope it helps.

Action cam is like the worst for pvp/wvw lol. It forces you in tunnelvision.

Jana.6831:

Fat Disgrace.4275:

Weirsd. Never would of thought that auto target would do that. I have the target option on, forgot it’s name now but for example if I use rush on and in selected target then target mid rush, the skill would change direction to that target but I doubt that will do anything to melee hit’s.

And no cnd worked normally for me as I use it vs clones/pets.

I have the most troubles if the target moves, clones and even pets often don’t.
And maybe there’s more than one reason for my “misses”.
With mesmers I mostly hit their clones when trying to BS them and even having them in target. But that was with auto target.

You can actually try CnD with and without auto target. If you’re used to click “next target” you will probably not notice a difference, but if the target isn’t selected the chances that you’ll miss are pretty high – even in PvE. And in wvw it was really bad tonight, for whatever reason, maybe I was tired.

It happens even without auto-target. It is rather buggy and been like that since launch. I even had my character turn around and backstab a pet instead of enemy i am targeting and don’t have auto-target on soooo….. I reported it couple times but Anet as always couldn’t care less as long as it only affects thief.

As far as next target goes – i just have cam zoomed out almost at max – gives you great field view and you can target most of enemies. In pvp anyway since maps are small.

Oh now that i think about – nice thing about pvp is you have standard models so you don’t have to struggle targeting tiny asuras in middle of miriad of minions. They probably should add such feature to WvW tbh.

Eval is super good at action cam. Just throwing that out there. Superzoom is beneficial for small-zone spacial awareness, though action camera has its own separate benefits such as targetless projectiles. Majorly-zoomed-out camera isn’t a necessity in WvW if you’re quick since you can’t keep an eye on a substantial portion of the map, anyways, unless you’re doing some kind of siege/AC usage over a wall or somesuch, but even then, siege resets your camera to where you had it last if you zoom out when using it. Which does bring back a benefit to a closer zoom – you do get slightly further-ahead sight distance with the closer camera, which can help for setting up plays and scouting in WvW.

…

Backstab has an attack hitbox, and can thus be bodyblocked, like all hitbox-based abilities, even if you have a target behind it selected. Mesmers often run clone generation on dodge or stealth/decoy, so bodyblocking happens regularly with them. It’s not a bug but just the way clones are generated getting in the way and how single-target skills in the game are treated in general, except for true single-target/non-hitboxed skills like Necro’s Axe.

I’m also almost positive standard models can be displayed in all formats, including PvE, since it also helps with performance problems on low-end PC’s. If it’s not there now, it definitely was at one point, since I’ve personally used the option in blobs in WvW in the past.

I don’t think there’s really a need since siege is available without having to pay coin these days via the provisioner. Since there’s a lack of use case, why bother putting in more power creep and exclusive content into WvW? Seems very far from how it should be. Especially since it’d be putting new/non-prestigious commanders at an even bigger disadvantage.

I’d rather see a separate, account-wide siege inventory made available only in WvW, though. It’d massively cut down on wasted bag space, and such an idea could be incorporated into the squad UI to let people donate to members of a squad, I.E., commanders.

Jana.6831:

Cynz.9437:

Hey, don’t generalize like this. I haven’t had auto target on for years. Then again i play d/p – auto target is suicide on dp.

I just use tab binded to next enemy, call target, target called target, mouse click – those suffice for me. Never had issues targeting anything with it, even mes among 1000 clones.

I knew that at least Deceiver would say something like “whaaa autotarget – you noob” that’s why I tried to take the fire out of that. I know that other girls are more pro than I :P (and I mean that).

Next target is really the only thing that halfway works and that only without auto target.
If I have 5 enemies around and want to hit the one who’s right in front of me, do I really have to click on him? That’s my issue, I guess, and autotargeting took care of that until 1,5 years ago and by then I forgot that I’m using it. I just remembered it because my unknown Gandara ally was killed because I jumped against the wall I had in target. Sorry unknown guy, at least I solved (?) what plagued me – that’s a plus, right?

I’m not sexist, sheesh. Women are just as capable as men are to move around a mouse and press buttons.

Woman or not, doesn’t stop you from being an autotarget noob ;D No excuses here, particularly not by throwing the rest of the gals under the bus to escape being labeled scrubby :P

In all seriousness, though, it comes with practice. Moving from any control scheme to another, you’ll be slower at first, but these are just the kinds of things you need to accept to get better and solve such issues. Tab target is your friend, though I only prefer it pretty much in PvE just in case I end up not selecting the target I actually wanted (only usually happens in congested places and I recommend not depending on it since so many gank groups like to run identical-looking characters), and in most cases in PvP environments on D/D you don’t really even need to target the enemy player at all for anything except steal; even Dancing Dagger PbAoE’s, although it needs to be aligned perfectly and quite literally be like < 30 range (so targeting is kind of a big deal for that one). When ganked by another thief, I typically infil signet -> CnD with nothing selected (if not blinded, as odds are the thief is adjacent) or DB or dodge and during the evade frames select the target for the counterattack, just because I know It’d take me a fraction of a second longer to stunbreak/retaliate an interrupt on steal into a combo after being hit by surprise, and there might just not be that time available. Even HS has a hitbox and functions without a target if you space it reasonably well.

You pretty much just need to keep track of where your mouse is when rotating the camera. I’ve gotten into the habit of unconsciously centering it on my character at a specific position on my desk whenever I’m done not moving the camera but moving the mouse. Ultimately building up mouse movement comfort will come in time when using more of the mouse.

I’m going to make a short-term recommendation for practicing which I’d normally never do otherwise, and want to make it absolutely clear that you should never do this for your actual play: Start clicking your skills in training on top of using no autotarget. I know, I can’t believe I’m recommending this; it seems ridiculous, but sweeping all around the screen with the mouse in and out of camera mode will make you get better at keeping track of where it is in relation to the screen and more comfortable of switching between free mouse/camera. You’re going to suck and be slow, and clicking will cause you to lose a ton of speed (and you’ll never reach the point of what you get on a keyboard), but you will see a profound increase in your target selection and overall speed in your mouse hand. Just be sure you don’t get too comfortable with it and end up being a skill-clicker :P

You’re telling me all this time you had auto-targeting on? -.-

Jim Hunter.6821:

DeceiverX.8361:

I didn’t really see much from this gameplay, though. The opponents played poorly, and it mostly consisted of favorable matchups (thief/reaper/ele).

A well played thief actually has the advantage fighting against this build. The druid isn’t running nature magic for all the passive bunker/boon crap and a good chunk of his damage is coming from fast attacks to stack bleeds without a lot of cover conditions, making it very easy to cleanse with evades. Plus the druid build is running longbow/staff which offers almost nothing in the way of cleave for a stealthed thief .

Of course most thieves in WvW are pretty terrible so it’s not that big of a problem.

I only took a wild guess on the build based on how much damage it was taking and how much it dealt – one which I was largely wrong about in terms of the exact specifics – and clearly demonstrates the definitive lack of proficiency the thief played with. I understand the OP’s build isn’t the meta NM/BM/D bunker, however I’m inclined to believe more warriors, scrappers, and other druids would have shown a bit more of a testy (and at least where I play, a much more representative) environment and probably would have reflected the meta a bit better. Though the OP playing bunkernoob have made a more accurate video for the current state of roaming/small-scale, too, despite being horrible to watch

Both weapons have distinct advantages and drawbacks in respects to the thief, though, particularly in how it’s played and what options for controlling the character itself are used. Staff is imho the best thief-killing weapon in the game due to the stealth tracking it offers with the capacity for druid to sustain into the thief revealing itself (if fighting D/X), and while not applicable to the OP, if you play ranger with action camera, you can linear cleave with longbow without a target, basically making killing thieves (especially those in SR or BP) like fishing in a bucket.

However, many thieves are in fact horrible, and there’s pretty much no way to play different weapons these days since they keep nerfing everything that isn’t D/P || Staff DrD or condi cheese.

Make no mistake, I’m not criticizing the OP (though I still think the death at the end was kind of a big misplay, but that’s nit-picky). I just wasn’t really sure what I was watching, since those matchups are so build-dependent, especially without having reference to the build which is pretty obscure, anyways.

(From above)

You say you play in off hours, yet that’s not really where small-scale should be flourishing exclusively. It was just as important in prime-time as it was before. We’re seeing omniblob only because the small-scale community is gone, and server links are only guising the problem that the population has dropped. Why else would Anet shift so much focus to WvW after HoT? Why would they include the PvE scene more and more into the game mode, such as GoB or the community-wide polls, rather than targeting changes to specifically WvW players? The bleeding started well-before the linking, and is going to continue just as rapidly regardless of what they do with it.

And, of course, the lag has factually gotten worse with HoT. Not because of pairings, but because of the professions. We’ve been told in the past the lag comes from the number of routines being called due to proc effects causing a whole bunch of code propagation. HoT objectively made this worse. There are more procs and AoE’s and more resource-demanding procs and AoE’s in the game than before. A lot of this comes from poor design and imbalanced abilities. You blame the lag as a major problem, and the lag is attributed by many community members to HoT, because the mechanics that make the lag even worse are disproportionately tied to HoT. It was never this bad before the expansion released.

Continuous improvements have been made, however small they may be. It still doesn’t change the fact the huge culmination of changes that happened in HoT blatantly killed off what was a very lively small-scale scene. Before the release in primetime T1, the small-scale scene was still imperative and very much alive. I ran small groups then in those tiers at that time. You could go three minutes without getting a fight between two groups of around five people. Roaming alone was dead beforehand, but in the higher tiers, roaming alone had been dead for years, since active communities realized that aside from having one or two people doing so to scout and tap, it was a waste of men; twenty people spread out alone over a map is much less effective at everything than six squads of three.

And the numbers continued to fall week after week. We’re about where we are density-wise pre-pairings, which was also an all-time-low per server, coincidentally which happened after HoT.

HoT vastly reduced diversity. There’s no way to logically deny it. Subsequent changes made even to this day keep reducing it. A lot of justification ultimately rests on how the elite specializations were implemented and how the surrounding content shaped WvW on top of the fallout of small guilds. The lack of options, lack of purpose in small-scale, and simply put lack of fun gameplay mechanics in small-scale removed the incentive for people to do it. All of this can be attributed in one way or another to the expansion, like it or not.

If ANet has the balls to nerf their precious elite specs and other diversity-killing abominations like durability runes and the new stat sets, that’s to be determined, but I’m not expecting anything, particularly since the majority of people that would be voicing their outrage have already given up and left the game.

I have dropped down servers intentionally as well. Actually, I’ve done so repeatedly because in our prime, our havoc guild has been one of the major factors in bringing guilds up tiers. Then they get bandwagoned, drama happens, everything falls apart, and the process repeats. I’ve been in small-scale guilds since day 1, playing crazy comps dedicated to messing big groups up (mesmer pentagram was my favorite). That said, I’ve surfed many a zerg when it’s been required. If there’s a 70-man blob at your keep’s gates, you fall in and give ‘em hell. Flipping hylek or tapping their keep isn’t going to do anything: they know you’re either coming to defend or can see your main force there already.

I’ve played at one point in time on over two thirds of the servers in NA and have run alongside almost every major guild that’s stayed around for longer than a period of two years. Yes, low-pop servers historically attracted more small groups and historically had better small groups, because there was not half-AFK-1-spam-blobbing SMC lords on these servers. If the numbers were reasonably fair, the matchups were a slugfest, and for as long as the wins didn’t accumulate too heavily towards one server, it stayed interesting. But low-tier servers didn’t grow. WvW kept shrinking, and more people kept transferring. People wanted free wins. Guild that transferred to T1 and got beat would run away to low-pop servers and steamroll them to feel better for the ktrain. And in many cases, the small groups would then also leave for greener pastures. They could beat the crappy guild groups that transferred in running hammertrain and the likes – it wouldn’t be hard to do – but the reality of the fact is that the “roaming style” you’re talking about above is the desire to play (and do remotely well with) any given loadout. Anyone was able to make anything work in small-scale WvW. Yes, some builds were better than others, like condi dire PU mes, but nothing felt absolutely and tremendously weak. This is why I call the game imbalanced and blame HoT. Elite specs broke this dynamic of fun combat – only a few certain things are even worth running, and pretty much all of the elites are absolutely mandatory, and the changes to guilds effectively negated small-group efficacy.

I’m giving you the causes; my list of ~200 active friends and followers, almost all WvW players, has been reduced to about six people, and the exodus started almost immediately with HoT. A lot of whispers from people who didn’t even message me in particular, just saying things to everyone they knew like "Going down friends list, quitting from HoT, find me here @[game]. My guild has quit the game. They returned with alpine, saying they would return with alpine, and leave again if the professions weren’t balance better or if DBL came back. They’re gone, due to the former (I keep in touch with them regularly as I’ve gamed with them for almost ten years). My backup guilds have quit the game. RL friends will not play or come back to it. When asked why, all of them give the same reason: HoT killed WvW. We had the same doomsday expressions coming from a million voices of small guilds when/before HoT launched, and nothing has changed. And now ANet is down on profits and players by a massive margin, despite pushing more sales and actually trying to work on WvW itself.

Contemplate what happened in the first few weeks of the pairings; WvW populations spiked. Massively. Not just more in queue; no, many servers saw their population level on server selection increase by a full tier. Previously non-full servers were full. This means that there weren’t just more people queuing for the same map; it means there were more people playing WvW in general. WvW saw a brief, true re-invigoration when linkings started happening. The demands of the community were not met in terms of providing a fun gameplay experience, however. And that’s the part that fails us all the most.

(Continued below)

stale.9785:

Beyond that, what gameplay are you engaging in where a pull that leaves you mobile afterward is an issue?

Probably WvW. It’s one of those major problem abilities there. But HoT killed WvW in general so… yea.

If you get hit by a pull without stability, you die instantly since there’s no dodge recovery window.

Particularly bad in this meta where the frontline can pull the backline at 1200 (which has no stability in most cases) into the meatgrinder while not needing to walk through a minefield and other opponents.

I was operating under the assumption it had been diagnosed as region-wide based on multiple claims from different ISP’s like the OP said. I can’t speak for OCX’s routing because I don’t live there :P

I guess it depends on how far away you are from the others within the region. If all localized to one country or nearby area, it could be something greater than the ISP, particularly for those in Australia/NZ, since there are going to be even fewer available routes out of the country.

If you can find people who play from the same general area or portion of the country as you, you might be able to get a better answer, If they’re fine, it’s an issue with the ISP and routing, which you may be able to get solved by giving them a call. If they’re not, it’s probably either bigger infrastructure or firewalls/misc processing getting in the way. It’s not something ANet has the control over (realistically) in either case, though. You need to be a game company the size of Riot to be able to set up the infrastructure globally to reduce latency.

While perfect balance isn’t possible unless everything is the same, it is quite honestly more or less an intuitive concept than one which can be proven. Thus balance is quite fluid and variable.

The problem is that by most anecdotal means and through professionally-defined ones, GW2 can be argued with overwhelming evidence as being strictly imbalanced. And that’s not a good thing. Many of GW2’s problems do not stem necessarily through numerical imbalances but instead conceptual ones which propagate between formats and other systems.

We know the causes behind the skill lag in WvW. It is still pertinent to the subject of profession balance and design, since most of the causes of why the game lags are tied to mechanics which people complain about as being imbalanced; I.E., passives.

Yes, magically fixing the skill lag with no changes to the design of the specs will make WvW a better experience than it is now, but it won’t explicitly make WvW fun. Even without lag, boon/block/invuln-domination would continue in blobs. The build pool would keep getting decreased over time. The fact this happened almost precisely after HoT and almost entirely involves HoT-related content heavily suggests the game dynamic has changed and has gotten worse.

I still believe sPvP systems should just absorb those from WvW and PvE. Why balance for three seaparate formats, each with different mathematical systems, when you can balance for all of them at once? Persistent-problem skills shouldn’t need to be changed individually between formats. If they’re persistent-problems, it’s because they’re poorly-designed. Fix the design-level; do not solve problems on the implementation-level. That’s best-practice in almost every industry and in software development for any problem scope. The talent at ANet shouldn’t be missing this, because I can tell you that every software dev they have already knows this. The designers are failing, which is really, really sad.

Roaming/Small-scale did not die with linking. It died with HoT. That’s just the truth. My entire friends list which I tried to keep up-to-date is inactive/quit. The return of Alpine and the prospect of links brought some players back for a little bit, and because the other issues with HoT (profession balance/design, subsystems like guild buffs, etc.) did not get fixed, the same people left again. It next has nothing to do with linking. As I said many months/years ago, simple-linking would solve symptoms of the problem, make it look like it’d get better, and then it’d just get worse, because the causes went undiagnosed. That’s what’s happening right now with server stacking, mass quitting, the blob mentality and death of small-scale, etc. Small-scale just isn’t fun the way it used to be because it’s dominated by a few select power-creeped builds. The entire reason people played small-scale to begin with was to escape the strict confines of the ZvZ meta and play what they wanted to. All small-scale took was playing well. Profession/build choice rarely mattered unless you tried to abuse cheese to fight massively outnumbered. Small-scale WvW was the most diverse and interesting PvP element of the game prior to HoT, and that has been completely wiped out.

So people who still like WvW just omniblob now.

It’s an ISP issue in the sense that network infrastructure is the only way to resolve it. Really, it’s just the nature of being far away from datacenters and having no localization to the region (I.E., you play on server hardware located across the world).

ANet can’t do anything about it without setting up infrastructure there (AKA millions of dollars in hardware, new offices, employees, etc.) or seeing big advances in network infrastructure in the region (AKA billions from ISP’s).

Obviously neither wants to spend the money on that buy-in; ISP’s are stingy and there’s major construction involved just to reduce some gaming latency, and ANet is already facing one of their worst financial earnings rates in years.

santenal.1054:

I think its called low skill floor and not high skill floor if something is easy to play and do well with.

Yea, unless the OP is referring to elite specs requiring skill to play lol.

I didn’t really see much from this gameplay, though. The opponents played poorly, and it mostly consisted of favorable matchups (thief/reaper/ele). The death at the end was entirely self-inflicted. Looks like a non-boonshare celestial build or some mashup. Too tanky and too low damage to be berserker, too low health to be marauder, too much crit chance to make me suspect a pure durability set or much else.

In essence, it captures the fact all the good players left the game because of the powercreep and imbalance that came with HoT. Honestly, the video could have been made like a week after HoT launch when the bulk majority of small-scale outright died from the DBL’s, profession power creep, guild hall/buff removal for small guilds, and the new guild upgrades trivializing fights.

Roaming itself like the OP was doing always resulted in gank groups. That was the point; get attention to a single player, either through trolling kills or contesting WP’ed objectives, while other allies support other areas being hit by larger organized units.

Havoc and fight guilds on the other hand, are a different stories.

RodOfDeath.5247:

Eval.2371:

RodOfDeath.5247:

No.

I’m checking out other mmos and the writing is on the wall with anet, they are sloppy and disorganized compared to other establishments. I’m seeing much more organization and communication with the player base in the competitors forums in addition to attention to bugs/PM/future goals.

Look around, you’ll be surprised….seriously.

I’ve been looking around my self, incase the 4th just does not cut it for me, any recommendations other than black desert and FFXIV?

FFXIV is looking good to me and I just want to get back to having an immersive mmo gaming experience. I have a few friends on BDO and they seem happy with it for the most part.

Anet is all show and no go, let’s face it.

I tried both. FFIV feels like I’m back playing a game like WoW – which I don’t consider a good thing.

I only lasted about a half hour in free the trial of BDO. For a full-action game, it was extremely clunky, and in all seriousness, I felt combat to be very boring, particularly on the ranger, which seemed to just be about alternating spamming the AA button and the ‘S’ key to kite. Also, laughably cringy-terrible story.

The landscape out there at the moment is awful.

Cause everyone playing HoT pretty much runs around with perma-stability, anyways.

It’s absurd compared to core game. But everything with HoT is. Quite frankly I don’t see any of the existing elites except chrono and reaper being swapped out of competitive play when the next expansion comes around. They’re pretty much all conceptually too good to pass up, particularly if ANet wants to try and not powercreep so badly again.

Lahmia.2193:

If a stealth attack is blocked/evaded or misses, does it break stealth? If not I think it was because you could spam it through 1 hit defenses like aegis and blind.

The problem is the ICD doesn’t take into account the long pre-aftercast animations on major skills like backstab itself, which some weapon sets like D/D power are extremely dependent on.

It also simply puts the entire #1 skill, including AA, on ICD on top of the cast animation. A lot of non-thief players don’t realize the pre-post cast animations for Backstab total almost .75s per stab attempt. The ICD puts it on almost a 2s cooldown. With revealed, that’s longer than True Shot and CoR, which are both ranged and have higher coefficients, the latter also being an AoE. You’re locked into either waiting out the duration of stealth in most cases since at absolute best you can get two attempts, or not using the best burst/damage option at that moment in time. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, except in the current game-state, landing a backstab is both sub-optimal for the thief to do, and in many respects, overly-punished for even trying.

Since they also nerfed BV, consistency for bypassing Aegis etc. also got dropped massively. Again back to the D/D argument you’ll see many people making, CnD no longer lands from BV’s nerf with mug procc’ing BV and thus passive deflection, and Backstab no longer lands if perchance CnD is used with BV over mug because passive aegis and blind is all over the game. Most counter-CC and single-hit negations come from passives when being CC’ed. BV’ed mug procs FoF or any other such passive causing CnD to whiff. Okay, remove Mug (DA, a “required” traitline on the thief) from the equation, but then you have it still being procc’ed before CnD because of SoH (Trickery, also a hard requirement trait line), which forces daze on steal and offers what used to be baseline steal cooldown reduction (AKA, a requirement). So now you remove two of the best traits on the thief to do what? BV a non-reduced cooldown steal/CnD chain without Mug, just to get a backstab? But now you’ve popped FoF or the passives via the BV on CnD. And backstab can’t land from the ICD.

Staff and OH pistol builds were honestly the least-impacted by this change overall, which is kind of stupid since those are the strictly better builds on the thief at the moment and OH dagger is widely considered underpowered for the sole reason of the overwhelming amount of hit-negation in the game.

It’s just so much better to play a dominant set like D/P which can just BP -> HS -> BV -> Steal/Mug -> Shadow Shot (unblockable blind to prevent retaliatory passives )-> AA chain/Shadow Shot again, since it pumps out better burst with no dependencies and no punishment on failure.

If they wanted to get rid of all passive effects and make those single-shot negations only last a second or so in order to keep the ICD, fine. but as it currently is, some sets/builds are just totally unplayable in the current state of the game due to this change.

RodOfDeath.5247:

QQing.3089:

Didn’t they apologize for a lack of communication with us about a year ago and promised to have more direct dialogue with the players ? I see that went well…

That seems to be a trend with them, broken promises and hyping up content without delivering. I just don’t trust anet and refuse to spend gems. It’s not worth it, xpac was a joke and transferring wvw servers can be easily done with gold to gem trade.

It feels like HoT degraded this game instead of improving it.

You mean like the way so many people said it would before it was released from just understanding the nuances and hints about the expansion suggesting a totally wrong turn for the game? As if their prior trends weren’t already on a crash course, and the content/elites/etc. in HoT was all clearly rushed?

BrokenGlass.9356:

I’ve been using a condition thief in spvp lately. I have so many dodges I feel indestructible. I can survive a 4v1 long enough to get my teammates to come to my aid (if we have voice coms up).

I still run and decap, but I don’t have to run from 1v1’s… or sometimes even 1v2s. The damage is nuts.

I love thief.

Inhale

Well, that’s because condi (D/D I assume) is stupidly easy for how effective it is, almost impossible to punish 1v1 if you play with half a brain, and pretty much nobody has means to deal with in when playing against the meta.

Exhale

Raven – Draven The Ravenous

Cynz.9437:

Joxer.6024:

Straegen.2938:

Joxer.6024:

What about pre-Daredevil?

Shortbow, S/P

Ok, taking the “learn the class” part out why didn’t anyone say P/P?

PP is spoiling since you don’t have to engage melee range thus you never really learn how to position yourself properly in melee, what to dodge etc.

I’ll echo this, though I don’t know if I’d have used the word ‘spoiling’. P/P carries its own style as well and things you need to look for (primarily applicable in the PvP environments with learning reflects, kiting strategy, etc.) which doesn’t really translate well to other kits. It’s a very easy set to manage in open-world PvE (blinds, range, brief immob, burst, might, interrupts), and due to its range is intrinsically a safer set in general, but it’s an under-performer for groups that want to fully utilize the thief’s game-leading melee-based damage (P/P DPS is low; burst is incredibly high).

Even for people looking to play P/P, I still recommend most with a start on D/D to learn positioning, when to commit, and the likes (although this is almost insignificant for PvE play; D/D is the best group-content PvE set on the thief at the moment, however due to its sustained damage output just barely being the best). P/P is similarly-expensive on initiative and has even fewer gap openers/closers than D/D. Having a good knowledge on how to act in melee even on a ranged set helps massively for when you get into melee range with an opponent (and it will happen), particularly since Steal is such an important ability and will teleport you to your opponent, anyways.

Also mentioned by Straegen, P/P is a very good set to have as a spare in your inventory on the basis it does make some otherwise extremely-difficult PvE content much, much easier (I have soloed numerous HoT-content champions with P/P).

If the thief wanted to rip Aegis and more boons he already could have before.

Stealth attack -> Aegis pop -> (precast) Stealth Attack again -> Steal/BT.

And he still can.

Non-stealth attack while stealthed -> Aegis pop -> (Precast Stealth attack) -> Steal/BT.

And it is still put on the revealed cooldown by this point. In essence, there’s really no point to the ICD if the target already has aegis and the thief isn’t stupid.

All the ICD did was pretty much raise the required proficiency of the thief to beat a DH when playing D/X and nerfed D/D while making it more difficult for the thief in general to deal with DH’s passive aegis trap, since Rending Shade will still get negated by the CC on steal forcing Aegis for the shade, which, of course, BT is supposed to set up the CC from BT to enable the damage.

At its best in most cases, RS still isn’t worth using unless your opponent plays with no Aegis. Depending on compositions, though, makes this trait too niche imho to warrant taking really anywhere.

If they were afraid of ripping two more boons every 4s then they would have put a higher cooldown on RS itself over the ICD on stealth attacks, since it’s still possible to do.

But if that implicit 4s CD possibility is considered fair, there’s no reason to not have just put it on the trait itself, considering the lack of ICD on stealth attacks wasn’t really ever a big deal.

Jayne.9251:

Also, calling something alliance or server or whatever will not resolve issues plaguing WvW. You have to resolve the bandwagonning issue FIRST.

This, right here.

That’s why I think matchups should be re-calculated weekly. Get rid of Glicko. Have the matchmaking be data-driven based on how a server has performed, transfer rates calculating where players have moved by WvW-hours from prior weeks, etc. This doesn’t even need to be confined to the ineffectiveness of 1u1d to solve this problem or any other simplistic algorithm. When dealing with predictions and the subjective nature of balance, more complex, data-driven systems are going to be required to get more accurate results.

Do this, and now you have a system that removes all the incentive from stacking – it deliberately punishes large groups of players from moving together, because with some tuning to how heuristics are weighted, it would ultimately force player-decided pairings aside in favor of the better matchup. Coverage stops being a problem. Population stops being a problem. Bandwagoning becomes extremely cost-prohibitive, and allied servers could constantly be rotated.

Letting players choose where they’r going to go solves nothing and exacerbates the existing problems of stacking and coverage. This should be something that should be avoided at all costs or the fate of WvW is sealed.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

DeceiverX.8361:

…snip… Thing is, GW2 doesn’t have a case of perfect imbalance, or even close to it. It’s just imbalanced, …snippity-snip

Evidence? o.O

Seriously… you and so many others will either make sweeping claims of imbalance and never point to specifics, OR when things are pointed at they’re so obviously subjective that it’s not evidence. I know that’s a sweeping claim I just made, but of all the balance complaint threads I’ve read I have yet to be convinced by anyone that what they’re claiming is imbalanced actually is imbalanced. Most often it’s something that doesn’t work for how they want to play, and that’s the real reason for the cry of imbalance.

So, again I ask you or anyone else for concrete evidence of the horrible game-destroying imbalance that I’m apparently blind to. I’m willing to read such a wall of text as that would require. I’d bet ANet’s Balance Team would also be interested in such evidence.

~EW

“So the next time you see players crying in a forum for same game element to get nerfed, wait a few weeks and see what happens. Did the development team actually have to go in and change things in a patch? Or have the players moved on and started demanding a different element be nerfed? If it’s the latter, you’ve probably just seen a case of perfect imbalance taking its course. If it’s the former, w-well, the players were probably right and something really was broken.”

Now tell me, how much have you seen top-tier builds across all the formats stayed dominant, and for how long?

For PvE, have we seen any shifts to this meta since the release of HoT? Not really. The top profession lists are still top profession lists by far and large. This is of course the easiest problem to solve since the gameplay mechanisms that only really matter here are ones bumping up damage. Do recalculations every patch in a big spreadsheet and you have the answer already.

For sPvP, how long since HoT have we seen the dominance of only a few select professions and compositions make up for the backbone behind many teams? Not much has changed build-wise since HoT, and nothing has changed philosophy-wise since probably 2013.

For WvW, how come the meta only ever changes in both small and large-scale once major nerfs and reworks happen which upset the comp synergy between groups? Over four years, there have been three unanswered strategies for large-scale: hammertrain, Pirate ship, and boonshare with a mixture of both. All of them had no counters until the game saw massive profession changes. It’s gotten more difficult to deal with each meta-iteration, too. WvW small-scale was actually very balanced until condition dominance with the condition reworks breaking dire condi builds (another developer-made change) HoT broke the game more with unkillable builds, increases in stats disproportional to other sets and their shortcomings, and removing many prior small-weaknesses of classes/builds in the prior slightly-cyclically-perfectly-balanced game mode. There has never been an evolution of WvW roaming pretty much since near after the game’s inception. All changes are almost entirely patch-generated.

Because like the quote (from the same video) says, a case where the meta doesn’t move rapidly implies just imbalance due to the problem of the game being solved, not perfect imbalance representing only the popular sub-problem.

Nike.2631:

Sartharina.3542:

Because there will always be a “Most optimal Path”, as Elder Scrolls demonstrates.

The game is imbalanced because it’s impossible to properly balance due to just how many factors there are in play.

Ug. Its not impossible to do better. Even if ‘perfection’ is impossible, better balance is better.

And better balance takes the form of reducing the performance gaps between classes and making the “second best” build for each activity 2-3% less than optimal, not 10-17%.

There’s room for improvement and they know it. It’s their job to know it, even if players throw up their hands and wail “alas, there is nothing to be done!”

Quite. The magnitude of difference and the curves of skill : performance alone (not even considering diverse environments) are things which can and always should be looked into further. This correlates to my mentioning above of relative balance; there’s always room for improvement in an imperfect system.

.000001 cm and .0000005 cm are very minute differences in length for our everyday purposes. However, that tolerance can mean an absolutely massive amount in the field of astrophysics. While we all know our understanding of measurement indicates infinitely-small increments, that push for measuring the next “half” accurately is massive and should always be pursued, since such shifts in tolerances could wildly affect previous and future hypotheses.

Rauderi.8706:

Tigaseye.2047:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

It already exists. It’s called Perfect Imbalance. Its ever-changing effects helps keep the game interesting.

~EW

You should be a politician.

Or, actually, you shouldn’t – we really don’t need any more of that type of whataboutery.

Imbalance isn’t “interesting”, it’s just bad design.

Um, actually…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e31OSVZF77w

Was waiting for someone to cite the source on this after EW made the claim. Despite being an excellent video, I believe this is one of the most commonly-misused sources when discussion game mechanics in respects to balance coming from those who are trying to justify a given state of imbalance. The mentality often comes from statements rejecting a need for a balanced game state such as “EC said it doesn’t need to be balanced to be good!” – which is quite the false way of looking at things, particularly in an RPG setting, where character permanency and diversity of styles themselves are important and numerous. The “noob tube” shouldn’t be providing free wins, and shouldn’t be in the upper echelons of performance in high-tier play.

Unfortunately, it’s just plastering a name that came from a professional youtube channel to the state of the game in an attempt to justify the lack of balance and suggest ANet is doing things correctly. Note the distinction of terms used. There is a definitive difference between “imbalance” and “perfect imbalance.”

Thing is, GW2 doesn’t have a case of perfect imbalance, or even close to it. It’s just imbalanced, which creates an environment not too unlike a perfectly-balanced game the more and more it strays from not being balanced; rock paper scissors is a perfectly-balanced game. But in the world of game design, total-luck-based games aren’t actually considered games, because there is no solvable problem within the confines of the game (although this can go into meta-analysis of games via psychology, but that’s tangential). For this reason it’s also imbalanced; a novice has the capacity to win despite all of the criteria for winning being totally out of his control.

Some of the easiest builds in the game (I.E. the “noob tube” analogy used in the video) are still the best ones there are because on the mathematical level they are overpowered. The converse is true with underpowered ones.

The case of GW2 is just straight-up imbalance. It has the same conceptual flaw of perfect balance; the game is kept uninteresting because the efficacy of diverse or new-player-driven builds is so minimal compared to dominant builds and strategies across all tiers of play that the element of diversity and not pure-skill wins which constitutes fun and fresh gameplay for both new and veteran players is not there.

The real means of how to manage imbalance in a diverse game is rapid iteration of changes. Since perfect balance isn’t possible, the best way to make the game seem balanced is to prevent the existence of refinement of optimal strategies. If you change the rules before playing every game of checkers, the fact the game itself is solvable is irrelevant, because nobody will figure out the optima in a reasonable time before the next game starts. This still requires successful balancing efforts, but agrees with the philosophy that perfect balance is impossible, while not simply just settling for less. This is what almost every major competitive game does, and why the games are competitive.

Depends on how and what you want to learn.

Rotations/familiarity? Just play whatever’s the best (or what you like, but these are statistically unlikely to coincide) for what you’re going to be doing and it’ll come with time.

Skill timing? I’d say staff against a hard-counter build played by a good player. Just keep fighting and losing until you start closing that gap more and more, getting a feel for when you should be doing things. Then spar against another profession, working your way up into even or favorable matches going hardest to easiest. Rinse and repeat. Die a lot, study your deaths and examine how you could have avoided them.

Placement, intricate combos and resource management? D/D power with S/x alternate, and try playing against a DH, druid, or similar hard-counter. Not being in the right position will either put you into being kited or killed on D/D. You’ll need to conserve or spend initiative and/or utilities in mass quantities to achieve gap closes, openers, mitigation/recovery, or damage. The need for the second set will get you more familiar with swapping weapons and meshing skills between sets together, which many thief mains are not good at doing since initiative allows for the primary use of only one set. That said, over-emphasized swapping will also get you killed, since being caught in a situation with the wrong kit in this case is extremely punishing. Push yourself to try and get kills with D/D when you can. Learn when you make mistakes and could not, and identify why and how to prevent it from happening more. Eventually you’ll reach a point where a majority of cases will come down to the sets under-performing. Then you’re good to move to others.

Note that when doing the above, do so via the rules of the format you’re interested in. Do not practice in sPvP if you plan to play WvW. The opposite holds true. The formats are wildly different, and based on the mathematics of stats, this is especially the case for how the thief plays and performs between them.

(sPvP only) Mobility and impact on sPvP games? Shortbow and nothing else in a practice arena. Learn the maps, proper point rotation play against friends (as others in actual games will rage at you hard for being a thief if you’re not carrying the game), where you can and can’t IA to, the nature of the kit, etc.

Junkpile.7439:

Profession balance is like smallest problem. Profession balance doesn’t really matter when maps are empty.

And they’re largely empty because the fights aren’t fun because the game isn’t balanced, so players just don’t bother anymore.

On the topic of balance, I expect all negatives from ANet and nothing good to happen. My guess is they’ll probably nerf power builds (especially thief damage scaling, probably in CS, because why not) and buff defenses game-wide to intentionally slow down the pace of WvW to mirror sPvP. I don’t expect reduced power coefficients or defenses on elite specs, though, I’m anticipating further gouging to core traits and abilities since ANet’s all aboard the HoT-powercreep train.

I’ll gladly be proven wrong, but I sincerely doubt anything substantial or positive will come from this patch.

Basically what I said early on in my anecdote about playing a thief in blobs.

If you do it really well, anything is acceptable to certain commanders. But that requires you not to screw up.

Spamming longbow on a ranger/druid makes it very easy to screw up from projectile hate alone. And quite honestly, most rangers just AA and RF into reflects and kill their allies. When your teammates are killing each other, there’s a good reason to be upset.

If you’re playing power longbow, you’re not contributing as much as you could be, particularly compared to staff. That’s a fact. Either you’re reflecting shots into your allies, or you’re simply not doing damage while waiting for reflects to go down. That said, hating on the ranger/druid itself universally is a rather poor thing to do if people instead play it other ways in a more conducive manner to the force.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I absolutely do not want new recipes for breathers.

I want breathers to be converted to skins, which use the same stats as our helms. There is no reason for us to have to add a 7th piece of armor and a 7th rune for the tiny fraction of the game that is underwater, especially since huge numbers of skills and traits don’t function there.

Would be nice.

I don’t think any of my characters have an exotic of ascended breather. It’s a waste to bother with it.

Either add them to the provisioner or remove the time-gating on the materials which makes expensive food like Furious stones. It’s stupid to spend so much money an hour on consumables for a competitive format.

Really, I think gathering nodes should give more or recipes yield more items. This would at least give an incentive for people to try and make money by gathering/crafting over killing and would greatly help food accessibility.

Malediktus.3740:

Server merges instead of linkings are the solution.
Server communities can never establish if people get rotated in and out every 1 or 2 months.

No it doesn’t. All it does is re-instate the same problems of stacking there were before; in which case the losing merges will see mass transfers off and we’ll be back to square 1.

To bolster communities, I simply think the colors should get their own names to enemy servers (like EoTM), but simply in the WvW menu post to which servers belong to which colors, and add a corresponding new chat option for /server.

This way it becomes much more apparent to which communities players belong to while still keeping enemy nameplates easy to discern which color they belong to. Since the child servers already absorb the name of their parent, it does nothing except make allies more able to distinguish themselves while not belittling their smaller supporting servers.

…And staff necro has worse damage than any ranger build. Almost all of the potential damage on staff necromancer comes from the AA chain, which is worse than ranger’s by miles and suffers from the targeting issue (although this can be negated on both classes via action camera). Everything about staff except skill 4 is pretty horrible in terms of dealing damage to enemies. Staff is useful in ZvZ only because of Soul Marks allowing for transfers and damage through blocks and giving the necro substantial lf gain from range/safety.

Wells and epidemic are what make necromancers useful in ZvZ. If we played in a game with no boons, they’d be below the thief and ranger for use in ZvZ.

Sylvyn.4750:

DeceiverX.8361:

The real, big, obvious problem with WvW, moreso now with the skirmishes and pairings in the mix, is profession/gear imbalance. It’s abysmal, and quite frankly, the single biggest reason why I’m seeing people not stay interested in the format. I know this isn’t in the scope of the WvW team, but this is something that absolutely needs to be pushed as hard as it possibly can; the profession balance and total absurdities in gear and food that came with HoT has pretty much crippled WvW.

The new profession/elite specialization mechanics aren’t fun. We shouldn’t be seeing build diversity, even in sPvP (via the removal of stat amulets) because of problem-child classes/mechanics. Having entire zergs running around with permanent all boons and 87% damage reduction isn’t fun. These are problems specifically on the profession-end that totally break WvW and cannot be fixed unless addressed. It doesn’t matter how good the matchmaking is or how much hard work you guys put in to fix WvW in its fateful hours if there isn’t a huge push to bring back the vitality of diversity we had before HoT released.

I can confidently say now that without major profession/spec adjustments, the game mode will not see improvement. Every single player I personally know who has stopped WvW’ing in recent months has done so due to profession imbalance and gimmicky mechanics, and the lack of fun and interesting combat in GW2 as a whole. Something needs to change, and it needs to change fast.

I think with these you are trying to say profession/spec/gear imbalance is a factor because we actually have only a few of each that are viable, so everyone is running them, that’s all you see and that’s not fun, right?

The lack of diversity isn’t fun, no, but neither are the fights which these optimal builds are used fun. How much joy do you get from fighting a properly-maxed blob with stacked damage reduction? How much fun a trapper thief or condi mes? A bunker druid that never stops running away? Autotaunt burst staff S/Sh invuln revenant? A Dh sitting on an objective? Teams of Scrappers running infinite group mobile stealth and infinite stunlocking? D/D condi evasion daredevil? None of these are fun to fight.

And what of gear? Anything optimal for PvP environments requires HoT stats on some level. You’ve got wasted stats without HoT gear, which demands re-forging ascendeds and the likes.

And in doing so, how many of the above builds will run durability runes? All of them except maybe PU condi mesmer. Full berserker thief or frontline guardian, it doesn’t matter for the most part. Everything is the same, and most of what is played just abuses exploitive mechanics and makes very few sacrifices.

Cynz.9437:

All those d/d bs:

- d/p is utility weapon set, you pick d/d which is pure dmg – ofc you will find d/p annoying, what did you expect? If i pick GS on war vs LB war, i would find LB annoying.

- d/p is barely keeping thief viable in pvp – lets QQ about it so thief is completely unplayable. You want to nerf spec because in some alternative universe, where HoT specs are not OP and DrD is, dp would be OP? What a moronic argument. And yes, if HoT specs were nerfed i am pretty sure DrD would be first one to get nerfed across the board – let’s not forget how MUCH devs LOVE to nerf thieves.

- wanna complain about d/p? Go try to play it w/o HoT spec and see how “broken” it is. Jokes are – you will uninstall the game

- also “easiest to play” – ahahahahahahahahaha, this is rich comming from D/D players HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Shall i remind you, your whole gameplay evolves around 51111511111111511112222222222222222. Or even better – equip condi amy -> SPAM 3 TO VICTORY = this is definition of “easiest to play”

- also s/p offers just about as much as d/p, the only thing that is holding it in pvp is rooting on pw but the set is awesome in pve, especially fractals

- also, most thieves run dash in pvp. But nooo d/p is OP because WvW issues – who cares that pvp exists.

OP speaks from power D/D. Everyone knows condi D/D is the easiest thief build to play and imho the easiest build in the entire game to play.

The fact D/P has superior engage, CC, and staying power to D/D and almost no loss in damage (in many cases especially now it has net gains in practice) is what the OP is saying: it makes no sense for D/D to be as bad as it is and D/P to go around playing with no sacrifices on pretty-much-optimal performance. On the subject of power builds, though, you’re so clueless it’s almost sad. Pretending D/P isn’t the easiest power thief set to play and pretending D/D is in good shape or even remotely on the same tier of effort in : performance out in sPvP is more laughable than basing the claims in WvW – since it’s more viable in WvW than in sPvP and always has been. Actually, a number of players (myself included) have had tremendous success in the past on D/D pretty much solely because it only works in WvW.

Clearly, you’ve never played D/D much aside from PvE or clinching bad players via 5->1 -> Shadowstep -> 5 -> 1. And if that’s the skill level you’re claiming to be playing on, please, the door to the thread is in the top corner of your browser. I’d argue CnD is weaker than Dancing Dagger, and HS is never worth using.

I think I’m beginning to understand why HoT’s powercreep happened. People are so crazed against making sacrifices to see their overall class improve and more diversity get introduced into the game that they’d rather see themselves being out-performed by another class with the ability to call OP rather than looking at the design-level problems of their own and presenting alternatives to fix the core problems, even if it “nerfs” some design aspects of the dominant builds.

An overwhelming majority of thief players I’ve conversed with in-game, including D/P and staff players agree D/P needs toning down in order to bring the thief up to snuff across the board and fix problematic design.

Whatever, though. The thief population can keep shrinking and get increasingly more spammy and skill-less as a profession, and the developers can continue to never improve the profession or buff it.

Does it help alleviate the problem? Yes . But like Torqued mentioned, it doesn’t really solve the problem per se. It’s putting painkillers on a gun shot wound.

Granted, I think solving the problem of population imbalance is a largely fruitless one unless servers themselves in terms of raw matchups are heavily based around population and player density, and the matchups are constantly shuffled on like a weekly basis to prevent stacking and transferring altogether. Have an AI using neural nets analyze coverage data to create better pairings based on this. I’m wondering if the hand-made selections we’re seeing are the training period to the future of this kind of mechanism, though. We’ll see what the future brings

Some people are arguing PPK matters too much now and the high PPK is removing the incentive from doing anything outnumbered. I’m not really sure if this is so true.

The real, big, obvious problem with WvW, moreso now with the skirmishes and pairings in the mix, is profession/gear imbalance. It’s abysmal, and quite frankly, the single biggest reason why I’m seeing people not stay interested in the format. I know this isn’t in the scope of the WvW team, but this is something that absolutely needs to be pushed as hard as it possibly can; the profession balance and total absurdities in gear and food that came with HoT has pretty much crippled WvW.

Fighting isn’t fun. Large scale, small-scale; it doesn’t matter. The actual main gameplay experience at hand simply isn’t fun. And that’s a HUGE problem, particularly in the respect of competitive “unfair” player-determined PvP systems. It’s not the WvW department’s fault so much anymore since you’ve done a good job relenting and fixing problematic design implementations like guild buffs (the +5 supply upgrade should be made very cheap, however, as to promote new guilds getting into the format and give the mode some sustainability since if a big name dies out or quits, many become discouraged without increased supply).

The new profession/elite specialization mechanics aren’t fun. We shouldn’t be seeing build diversity, even in sPvP (via the removal of stat amulets) because of problem-child classes/mechanics. Having entire zergs running around with permanent all boons and 87% damage reduction isn’t fun. These are problems specifically on the profession-end that totally break WvW and cannot be fixed unless addressed. It doesn’t matter how good the matchmaking is or how much hard work you guys put in to fix WvW in its fateful hours if there isn’t a huge push to bring back the vitality of diversity we had before HoT released.

I can confidently say now that without major profession/spec adjustments, the game mode will not see improvement. Every single player I personally know who has stopped WvW’ing in recent months has done so due to profession imbalance and gimmicky mechanics, and the lack of fun and interesting combat in GW2 as a whole. Something needs to change, and it needs to change fast.

Reverence.6915:

DeceiverX.8361:

The bunker build does plenty of damage; capped 25 might literally gets it around 3/4 of where a full berserker build would be when not running so much boon sharing. It’s not uncommon to take an RF for 7-9k from the bunker build. That’s a ton of damage from something built almost entirely defensively.

DPS means nothing in WvW, and ranger’s DPS isn’t the lowest, either – it’s got quite the lead on mesmer IIRC. Any mesmer will tell you that. The ranger has fairly decent access to burst damage despite its low AA performance across its weapon, and the staff’s AA is nothing to sneeze at – each cycle does more damage than the longbow, albeit a slightly lower DPS (but again, it doesn’t matter in PvP environments).

Prot + well-scaling Regen +Bark Skin + Heals + Stealth + Mobility + range and then very solid damage coming from the HoT pets pretty much mixes into a combination which cannot be bursted, cannot be sustained against, cannot be kited or reset, and cannot go all-in on. The boons come too fast for most removal capabilities, particularly since in order to strip boons, it requires stripping both the pet and the druid itself; realistically, only well of corrupting might be able to get a few boons, and that’s still pretty shaky.

The problem with this as well is that it pretty much creates an environment where the ranger and druid are going to stay weak in order to keep this build in line. Boon access across all classes should be substantially dropped – it’s not a problem exclusively with the druid, either – but having boons account for holes in the profession creates less build diversity by creating false choices; 25 might is pretty much always going to be better than any other trait line when it comes to damage. If bundled with defensive capabilities, it ends up being a very obvious choice. The contemplation of making the sacrifice to damage or defense at the gain of the opposite should always be necessary on every profession.

No. Even before the boonshare meta and before the druid nerf, they were at best a niche class to use as a healer. Fact is, they don’t do much AoE damage and they don’t provide much in the way of party support that can outclass what other classes already bring (while at the same time those other classes bringing more AoE damage). Use your druid for small scale roaming where it dominates. Don’t bring it into the zerg where it’s useless.

Which is literally what I said and what I stated before as to why the druid doesn’t have a place in blobs.

Never have boon builds been dominant in large-scale, because only a few really important boons even are impactful; the rest is dependent on skill coefficients and raw durability in order to overcome the hurdles of dealing and receiving mass damage and corruption efforts. The ranger has one of these in a troll build (Nomad’s frontline GS tank), but its coefficients aside from its intermittent burst (even on more power-heavy buids) are low enough to not warrant play in ZvZ.

These kinds of boon sustain builds are what shine in small-scale and sPvP, which is also what I said.

And is further why I said the boons need to go; ranger is in a position due to the druid where it can’t see much of an increase in performance of its kit because if it got the coefficients or better support to have a spot in the zerg, its already-dominant roaming performance and low barrier of entry would make it even stronger than it is in small-scale.

TL;DR: Nerf boon access, buff ranger/druid mechanics in isolation.

The bunker build does plenty of damage; capped 25 might literally gets it around 3/4 of where a full berserker build would be when not running so much boon sharing. It’s not uncommon to take an RF for 7-9k from the bunker build. That’s a ton of damage from something built almost entirely defensively.

DPS means nothing in WvW, and ranger’s DPS isn’t the lowest, either – it’s got quite the lead on mesmer IIRC. Any mesmer will tell you that. The ranger has fairly decent access to burst damage despite its low AA performance across its weapon, and the staff’s AA is nothing to sneeze at – each cycle does more damage than the longbow, albeit a slightly lower DPS (but again, it doesn’t matter in PvP environments).

Prot + well-scaling Regen +Bark Skin + Heals + Stealth + Mobility + range and then very solid damage coming from the HoT pets pretty much mixes into a combination which cannot be bursted, cannot be sustained against, cannot be kited or reset, and cannot go all-in on. The boons come too fast for most removal capabilities, particularly since in order to strip boons, it requires stripping both the pet and the druid itself; realistically, only well of corrupting might be able to get a few boons, and that’s still pretty shaky.

The problem with this as well is that it pretty much creates an environment where the ranger and druid are going to stay weak in order to keep this build in line. Boon access across all classes should be substantially dropped – it’s not a problem exclusively with the druid, either – but having boons account for holes in the profession creates less build diversity by creating false choices; 25 might is pretty much always going to be better than any other trait line when it comes to damage. If bundled with defensive capabilities, it ends up being a very obvious choice. The contemplation of making the sacrifice to damage or defense at the gain of the opposite should always be necessary on every profession.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Contrary to what a lot of people in this thread are saying the balance is actually pretty good right now. However the combat is another story… The HoT power creep pretty much ruined the game, the meta is ridiculously boring and if you want to experiment with new builds you need to grind through hours of PvE to gear up.

Along with that they still haven’t addressed issues like smaller servers losing their identities due to the server linkings, smaller guilds and roamers being kittened over by the GH upgrade system, and the passive upgrade/surveillance systems ruining small scale WvW.

Balance is “okay” in the rock-paper-scissors sense in the confines of HoT-only play based on the meta for each profession. The game isn’t even closed to what I’d call fair between dominant builds, but rather more or less a mix of counters. In essence, what caused sPvP to fail is now in WvW. And now WvW is failing in its small-scale as a result.

Any small deviations away from high-tier build play, which mostly consists of overly-durable boon-and-CC-heavy builds for no reason, and it’s immediately by far and large the worst it’s ever been. Dont like your elite spec or HoT gear? Pretty much sucks to be you; it’s required or you lose. There are so few viable alternative options that I’ve simply given up trying to find interesting fights and also rerolled my profession after three and a half years of making a low-function build succeed well. ANet has continuously nerfed the underpowered builds more and buffed the stronger ones further to enforce a stable meta, which by all technical game design standards, is considered a horrible, horrible practice. It’s so bad on so many professions and builds that I’ve simply given up trying to have fun in WvW, and have definitely given up on small scale. The same is said for my whole guild, which when returning from the removal of DBL, also quit promptly again from the imbalance and simple lack of fun, and even more loyal members to the game who continued to log in are faltering quickly and logging off upset (myself included) day after day because of the obvious lack of diversity and intrigue in the game at the moment. The fights are all the same, and most notably, the fights aren’t fun.

Based on the spreadsheet, it looks like none of said bonuses were considered outside of a factored bonus of the differences from NQ/PT (just a guess here).

It comes down to the old DPH/DPS argument and what constitutes “enough”.

As Eval mentioned, his build is intended for multi-hit builds utilizing skills like Unload and Pistol Whip, which have strictly higher demands for more precision rather than being able to focus everything into DPH while getting one-off/two-off crits (such as a build like mine).

If Eval and I both swapped weapons without traits or gear, we’d both see substantial losses in our damage, since his crit chance would be redundant on a one/two-hit build, and my crit chance would be too low to make P/W actually do very much, despite my build having between 20 and 60% more “effective power” than both.

Such builds are also dependent on matchups as well. Eval’s will inherently do better in situations where targets have lower toughness and if he gets might from allies, however Kash will have better damage against high-toughness targets or with limited boon coverage (albeit it takes little to put Eval’s build in a superior position in almost every environment due to the sheer ferocity difference).

Marauder is strictly better. There was past incentive to run both by splitting armor between berserker and valk to achieve the same or custom distributions of stats.

Really, there’s pretty much no incentive to play run marauder. Almost all of its shortcomings can be negated by other gear/trait choices and in most cases, a few stacks of might.

Small-scale at the moment makes WvW not worth playing. It’s way worse than even pirate ship because builds are almost the sole factor in what determines who wins.

I recall an ANet programmer a long time ago on the issue claiming it was because of proc effects causing a huge number of interrupts to be made when the fight happens. This also explains the phenomena as to why performance has only gotten worse over the years; the vanilla game had very few of them, and they’re absolutely everywhere, now. It also explains why it only happens in blobs (yet affects the rest of the map); the server won’t choke if these things happen even only milliseconds apart across the map.

Most of the major issues in WvW right now can be traced back to primarily class balance and the advent of the guild hall killing small guilds’ presence in WvW. Small havoc groups quit when they realized they needed 3k+ gold for the +5 supply buff, and are not coming back because roaming and havoc simply just isn’t fun with how the professions and powercreep from HoT is right now (I.E. re-forge your ascended gear into HoT-stats or gtfo).

anduriell.6280:

Jana.6831:

I swear if I ever hear a ranger or druid complain…
Nearly every class scales rather badly in zergs, so what?
And the moment my class isn’t as useless as it is now against bunker druids I will personally dedicate my life to kill each and every druid I see.
I’m not sure what’s the most OP class right now, but I guess it’s druid. Berserker is pretty bad alone – 4 people to kill one druid, 6 people letting 2 berserker run free cause we’re unable to kill them. GG, anet, GG. (yes, I just rage quit wvw) (because of a druid).

And if I ever decide to become a commander I will kick each and every druid and ranger out of my squad. Because I can’t understand how people can have fun with these faceroll builds – “Oh i’m such a pro, killed them with my faceroll build!”.

oh you again with this song. Look, reroll a druid so you understand the class and stop writing things like 7k-8k staff auto.

back in topic as i said, ranger and druid had a very interesting choices of skills and traits that made the class a team player, focused in support. But the skills and class got gutted in some later on nerfs that left the class as a solo by myself kind of play.

Reverting those points would make the vanilla ranger morw wanted (mobile spirits) and allow the druid to have a build for groups\squads (lingering light and verdant etching)

the ranger\druid will still lack damage but i at least it would have an spot as group support.

The also pet needs to be traited for it’s survivavility thus doesn’t have access to evades and cleanses\stun breakers so it doesn’t die instantly at the sight of an enemy zerg.

I would like to mention, at least in the other ranger thread which I am thinking of, Jana did not post the 7-8k auto claim. That was someone else. That said, the number typically hovers between 3 and 5k on the bunker build, depending on opponent.

The bunker druid is actually objectively overpowered in small scale, though.
But so is anything with tons of boon access. It’s not so much the druid itself but the boons access + sustain it has on top of the kit it has access to. Take any one of those away and it’s relatively fine. It’s essentially D/D celestial bunker ele except with ranged damage, no-investment damage via the pet, and some of the best mobility in the game.

I don’t think anyone really can argue giving the druid some mobility as a poor choice. The pet is a problem which extends from the design of the core ranger, and the druid is based on sustain and support.

So really, it’s just a matter of boons, and when you look into pretty much every dominant build that’s ever been dominant on this scale (outside of blatantly mathematically overpowered ones like shoutbow), they all have one thing in common which sets them over the tipping point: boons on an intrinsically sustain-heavy kit.

The thing is that the druid does not have the same weaknesses as these other designs. Prior boon-heavy builds mostly did not have major mobility capabilities, and thus, could get shut down by a thief or necromancer (which I’m not saying is good design; quite the contrary which is why I think boon-dependence is bad in concept). The druid, however, has quite tremendous mobility and range, making the hard-counters to boons less effective an in some respects, even hard-countered themselves.

The new stats are not available to users without HoT. It’s crafted using HoT-only recipes or HoT-only rewards. ANet no longer cares about you if you don’t have HoT. Everything is full-HoT.

That’s pretty much why so many people (who no longer play and/or played competitively in WvW) hated on the expansion and still do; it absolutely broke the game with the amount of power creep it brought.

I’m hording materials for the next expansion already because I’m just going to assume they’ll release gear with another 40% more stats on it.

Lorelei.3918:

I’m using a off the wall double longbow zerker build.

I did this a long time ago when QD was first implemented – although I was using RF more often as a periphery-bomb (there were a lot fewer reflects in the meta/game at the time). It’s a lot of fun to see all the numbers, though it has some pretty severe issues in terms of lacking damage and utility to the rest of the group. Though this is more group-specific.

MrFluffy.9307:

Chaba.5410:

The meta in WvW right now feels very much like the sPvP Season 1 bunker meta where matches could be played til timer ran out (remember the pro team Zero Counterplay quit because of a single cap while the rest of the points remained indefinitely contested?). And that’s no surprise since the HoT bunker stats that got removed from sPvP are still in WvW.

All the boosting of defense has done is encouraged players to get more numbers for wins. That’s bad news for a game mode with a shrinking population.

I think you hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what fights have felt like for me.

That’s what the whole game has pretty much turned into. The defensive amulets in sPvP were removed because the class balancing job and powercreep from HoT on the defensive side was so broken they had no choice but to remove them.

Profession balance team != sPvP/WvW teams. The latter only control features going into their specific game modes, like amulets. The profession/general balance team is quite literally the only group which can be assigned blame for the horrid state of the game in general.

The sad truth is an error in ANet’s company dynamic. Instead of profession/general balance being a composition of viewpoints coming from the various viewpoints, it’s an isolated group that does not acknowledge these differences and thus makes changes to things on the basis of virtually any argument they can think of, biased, unfounded, or whatever it may be, and as such, these adjustments go unchecked by the rest of the game.

There is never going to be profession balancing in WvW. There is likely never going to be profession balancing anywhere, generally speaking, until ANet’s company understanding of the significance of fun and fair gameplay changes, and only if that recognition results in corresponding changes to fix the problems.

Split “balancing”, stat distributions, point allotments, amulet/rune removals, etc. only guise symptoms of the actual problems in that the professions are way out of line.