A few weeks back ANet asked what new stat-combinations we would like to see in game and Power (main)/Precision/Toughness was the most popular request.
It also seems a reasonably balanced combination as it has both offensive and defensive stats.
Assuming that they will at some point add this stat-combo, how can the Warrior class make the most if it? Given our high base-line Vitality, Toughness is our go-to stat for survivability.
We also have Armored Attack in our most popular trait-line further increasing the appeal of this stat-combo. Ferocity also isn’t nearly as good a stat as it used to be. However the impact will certainly be noticed, even with Armored Attack.
Alternatively you can also mix it with some Cavalier gear if you want to sacrifice Precision for Ferocity.
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this potentially new stat-combo? Could it be a thing for Warriors or is it too similar to Knight’s and Cavalier gear to open any new horizons?
Countless hours. Two Legendaries. WvW Commander. Yet… still clicking skills. Sigh.
Thank you for your non-constructive criticism! Your input would have been appreciated had you actually given some !
You have to read between the lines. I think it’s “stop clicking your skills”.
I know what he is saying. I also asked for constructive criticism.
That is constructive. He’s telling you specifically what you need to change.
I simply refuse to watch PvP videos of people clicking, especially in Guild Wars 2 where you only have about 10 key to keybind.
Condition removal without Cleansing Ire is simply too scarce considering how generously they are applied.
And Defense in general has some really, really powerful traits it’s hard to pass on.
Yeah, Lich form deals INSANE damage. Like wtfpwn kind of damage. I don’t really know Necromancers well enough to qualify this as OP, but it seems broken compared to before the patch.
Anyway, Trickery allows you to steal their Stability and then you can pound them with CC like Pistol Whip.
But if you’re playing P/D, then simply don’t engage them until Lich form has expired.
Show me how Anet has used the other CDI’s and implemented changes based on the feedback they recieved?
This, so much this.
CDI sounded good, but nothing ever came of it. Our feedback really doesn’t matter at all.
Let’s be honest here for a second. Your ranking has nothing to do with your individual contribution. Nada.
Rankings are determined by coverage, not by individuals. So someone on Desolation or Gandara hasn’t done more to deserve the rewards than say, someone on Fort Ranik or Elona.
It would make sense to reward people based on their achievements, but then all the transfers people would whine for not getting exclusive rewards they paid so much for.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Death Blossom is a remnant from the days where aNet still though they could make a single weapon-set both appealing for Power and Condition users.
Or maybe originally, things weren’t supposed to be separated at all unlike the way they are now.
Whatever the case may be it’s clear that Death Blossom serves no purpose in the D/D weapon-set.
I doubt we will see any big changes to this game until Wildstar has launched.
NC Soft is probably keeping the lid on things in Guild Wars2 in the hopes that many will try/migrate to Wildstar, a game with similar aspirations but a subscription fee.
Guild Wars probably won’t get rolling again with interesting features until Wildstar is 2+ months into it’s life-cycle.
Imo Guardian group-support is the most imbalanced thing in this game.
lol
Now you laugh. Just wait till the immortal guild blobs reach you with their 50% Guardians, 50% everything else setup and tell me how funny it is.
And I’m sure it’s totally balanced that Guardians have been the undisputed, uncontested mid-bunkers in sPvP since day 1.
Yeah, their OP group support is surely just in my head.
You must be new to video games. GW2 is actually quite tame in this regard.
^ all irrelevant.
downed state is a core game play mechanic of guild wars 2 and it will not be removed.complaining about downed state in guild wars 2 is just like complaining about
- why soccer must be played with foot only, not hands
- why basketball must keep on bouncing the ball
- why cannot kick the ball in basketballbecause, rules, are rules.
Dee Jay, you have played so many games of team arena in europe, yet cannot come to accept downed state as it is. but you will continue to play anyway.
“Servers are such a fundamental thing in GW2 that they will never change the server structure. Complaining about dead servers is about as useful as complaining about…”
See what I did there?
MMOs change over time. In fact that’s a big reason I continue playing them. Everything can be changed if the devs want to and have the resources.
A dev even acknowledged at some point that downed-state has issues. So I do think it could be changed. We don’t even need a fundamental rework of the entire mechanic. A little fine-tuning of the downed-state and rally mechanic would suffice to mitigate the most severe negative impacts.
…2 second finishers (down from 3), 1 rally per kill, less HP in downed state, counters to Mesmer and Ele downed-state etc. would all help make the issue less severe. But nothing has happened since launch to the single-worst mechanic in this game.
As a roamer and burster, you really shouldn’t be too concerned about 1v1.
If you’re fighting a fair fight, you’re doing it wrong.
And there you have the problem with condi-builds.
They offer no counter-play, nothing you as an individual can do at any given moment to avoid them or beat them in any way.
Yes, you can alter your build and may have a better chance but ultimately your class mechanic, not your personal skill dictate if you beat a condi-build or not.
And that’s why conditions are so broken in this game.
They are useful for leveling a crafting profession from 450 upwards.
Other than that….yeah….
Runes of Strength are good…..but not THAT good for Thieves.
Thieves can’t stack Might like Warriors or Eles. Sure, we have a few sources of Might and won’t have a problem maintaining a few stacks at all times….but we don’t roll in 15+ stacks all the time like some other classes.
So I would say that, while certainly a good choice, maybe even the best for hardcore players, other Rune sets can be equally viable. Hoelbrak Runes, Runes of the Pack and Runes of the Mesmer are all reasonable choices for a fraction of the price.
I also thing that there is a fair chance they might be nerfed a little. They do seem excessively good and popular. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a nerf to Might duration.
-snip-
Deimos is terrible at arguing.
He doesn’t argue form a mechanical or game-design pov. Instead he argues that because something is the way it is, that this is automatically good.
That is false, and the entire reason to have this debate in the first place.
Just because all restaurants sell Burgers, doesn’t mean Burgers are the best food to eat.
That’s no real arguing, that’s statement of fact.
And a few other facts are:
Downed-State undermines the importance of combat, the core aspect of this game, in favor of a arbitrary and unintuitive downed-state mechanic. Who wins team-fights isn’t decided by coordinated burst, crowd-control or other team-eforts, it’s most often decided by who gets the stomp. Really?
It also limits the room for excellence. Even a great player will have a hard time coming out against 2 other players because of downed-state. And that means 1v1 is really the only area to shine. And that’s simply not enough. Everyone can win 1v1, it’s not an amazing feat. But nobody can win 1v2 (a few exceptions, I’m sure)…so where’s the room for excellence?
And then there’s general imbalances like: How come it takes me 20 seconds and 15 skill-uses to kill a player, and a Guardian can revive him within 3 seconds, effectively negating all my efforts with a simple click? How does that factor into risk/reward, effort/results? Just for comparison resurrections in other MMOs were typically ~10 second casts that would be interrupted by ANY damage. Just for a little perspective….
Downed-State really has no redeeming qualities. It encourages stacking in PvE, it encourages Zerker meta because you aren’t punished for being downed, it’s a massive snowballing mechanic in favor of the winning parties, it doesn’t punish lazy behavior in big events and the list goes on…
There is simply no defending it for a game-mechanics point of view. You can defend it because it’s already there, like Deimos did, but that isn’t really adding anything worth-while to the debate.
What is there to talk about really?
Matchups are decided entirely by coverage, every game was pretty predictable (except where servers were double-teamed) and in general the scoring algorithm undermines any competitive spirit.
Swiss style meant playing the same matchups over and over again.
And let’s be frank here, NOTHING has changed about WvW for the past 9 months and very little since launch. I really don’t see what’s debate-worthy here.
Hardly surprising.
Every guild-zerg I come across nowadays is boasting something like 40-50% Guardians. The class turns everything around them into an immortal killing machine while being super-hard to kill themselves.
It’s really quite annoying.
Imo Guardian group-support is the most imbalanced thing in this game.
I would love to opt-out of Skyhammer. I don’t mind the other maps being randomized, but Skyhammer is a problem.
Downed-State is the single worst mechanic I have ever witnessed in any MMO ever.
I have a hard time imagining a mechanic that could possibly be more detrimental to the combat of this game. Downed-State has made me rage and curse this game more than all the lags, Thieves, PU Mesmers and Hambows combined.
It is so bad, such a crutch-mechanic, that it defies any competitive notion of this game.
Only in GW2 do you beat someone in 5 seconds….only to spend the next 15 second chasing after them trying to get a finish. And if you fail, they rally and you are at a disadvantage and lose, despite “winning” the actual fight.
Only in GW2 can a Guardian revive people quicker than a normal player can finish.
Only in GW2 do you “beat” someone in a 1vs.2 situation only to end up dead, while both enemies survive unscathed because of downed-state.
Only in GW2 are group fights decided by stomps, not by actual combat.
Only in GW2 is it bad to have NPCs or bad players assist you in combat because they allow your enemy to rally.
Only in GW2 does the winning team revive by killing enemies, while the losing team needs to manually rezz. Snowballing ftw.!
Only in GW2 do you have 400% of your normal HP, AFTER you’ve been defeated. Logic ftw!
Only in GW2 do you kill bosses by stacking on the spot, partially because of downed-state.
I can literally not imagine any aspect of this game that wouldn’t be better without downed-state.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
The open world raids…..if we want to call them that, have basically retained all the bad things I used to hate about conventional raiding.
- The constant rehashing of boss tactics
- Hours of waiting just for a single try.
- An hour of organization before very Wurm attempt.
- No sense of progression. You killed him easily last time? Well this time it may well fail.
- Useless rewards (obviously).
To the individual player the raids aren’t even that challenging. They are a challenge to organize, especially in the days of megaservers, but not a challenge to execute.
Basically the challenge of these events isn’t in the encounters themselves but in the surrounding meta-game.
At the end of the day these open world raids don’t have a single redeeming quality. They are essentially 150 man instanced boss-battles but without the mechanics in place to manage that many people.
The whole concept of challenging open-world bosses is a failure to begin with and no longer worth exploring. If you want challenging fights, put them in instances and gives people the tools to manage themselves.
I used to run Valkyrie gear too. I liked it a lot too.
But when it came to crafting Ascended gear I wanted something I can use both in PvE and WvW. So I rolled with Berserker.
And frankly, once you take Practiced Tolerance and Guard Leeching into account, the HP bonus from Valkyrie gear just isn’t all that huge. Guard Leeching especially has really devalued Vitality from gear.
Prior to all the buffs it would be something like 12.000 HP (Zerker) vs. 15.000 HP (Valkyrie). That’s a 25% increase and certainly worth sacrificing 15% of your crit-chance.
But after all the buffs etc. take effect, even a Zerker Thief is sitting close to 18.000 HP. And 21.000 HP from Valkyrie gear (only a 17% improvement) just doesn’t look nearly as appealing.
The thing is, Thieves rely mostly on active mitigation. Dodges, Blinds and Stealth are al used to avoid damage. At the end of the day, in terms of practical game-play, I just don’t find those extra HP making a huge difference.
For every fight I win with sub-3000 HP left there are two fights I would have won had my Heartseeker crit.
I play D/P a lot in WvW. I know how to play it and play it well.
But frankly, I just don’t see the appeal in sPvP.
The only thing it’s good at is dueling other Thieves. But that’s not what sPvP is about.
Mostly though it’s the sodding poor Backstab damage that turns me off. Backstabs in sPvP hit for pitiful damage, mostly around 4000-6000, depending on the target.
Any Pistol Whip will deal the same, if not more damage, while:
- avoiding damage via evades.
- stunning…and thus interrupting/pressuring the enemy.
- no positional requirements. Pistol Whip hits for the same everywhere.
- Cleave damage…lots of it. Great for suppressing revives.
- Can be spammed. No setup required, no cooldown.
And all of this can be pre-cast from range as well, when used in conjunction with a shadowstep.
I just don’t see what D/P brings to a team-fight that Pistol Whip doesn’t bring in a better and more reliable fashion.
D/D only really does well in group situations when you have others to take all the attention while you do your thing.
But in solo roaming it’s just not that good. Today most other roaming builds have a number of defensive cooldowns, traits and effects to mitigate your damage. This isn’t 2012 anymore where you could kill most enemies with a single Cloak and Dagger + Backstab combo.
Builds and players have evolved. Dagger/Dagger has not.
D/P fares much better when solo. It uses the same gear and roughly the same traits, so switching isn’t a big deal. The play-style takes getting used to as it’s quite a bit different than D/D. D/P excels at going toe to toe with enemies and tanking them with Blinds, rather than constantly stealthing.
I’d recommend you give it a shot.
I agree that Shortbow really doesn’t help much in solo-roaming scenarios. There are very few situations nowadays where I ever switch to the Shortbow. Mostly it’s just a Bloodlust-stacking weapon and used for Zerg fights.
P/D might be a very viable alternative weapon-set.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Funny, I don’t recall any issue actually being fixed (except Dredge Fractal).
Sizer is really good at S/D. He says it’s his favorite build to play.
But that doesn’t mean it’s good for everyone. Frankly, most Thieves I see in tPvP would be better served running a different build. But most people like to follow, rather than think for themselves.
2/0/0/6/6 works well for a particular guy in a particular scenario, his team. That doesn’t make it the best build for all Thieves.
I tried it, I can see it’s worth, but I have found a Power-based Pistol Whip build to be much more effective and useful than any S/D build. Thieves excel at two things, fast roaming and bursting down targets. And Pistol Whip does that better than any other build (even after the nerf).
It’s not great in duels, it doesn’t make you appear super-skilled in a video, but it gets results and it does so faster and more effectively than most S/D build could ever hope to achieve.
Knowing the other classes really helps.
And then there’s general rules like “never fight an Engineer inside his supply drop” and “when fighting a Warrior, watch out for Berserker Stance and kite it” etc.
And stuff like Whirling Axe being able to reflect and thus is best used against projectiles etc. I.e. stuff that’s not hard to understand but not intuitive either.
But most of all situational awareness makes a good Thief.
How does it make sense for Drakkar Lake to beat Ring of Fire in 3 of their 4 matchings by a wide margin (and lose once with a small margin) and still end up behind them?
You see a bunch of ranger using bow, and very few warrior is spaming rifle in dungeon.
People have the impression ranger are suppose to use bow, due to lore from books/movie/other games.
It’s also that Ranger melee weapons are god kitten ed awful to use. I only leveled mine to 8 but god kitten that perma-hopping with mainhand Sword is super-annoying.
I can almost understand why most Rangers don’t play it.
Yeah I agree,
Being a good roamer is less about being great 1v1 (or 1vX) and more about being able to pick your fights and disengage at will.
And Thieves excel at that. If a Thief uses a long-duration stealth very few people will try pursuing that and even if they do it’s mostly futile.
I wouldn’t say Thieves are the best 1v1 class, but they do fare quite well if you know how to play.
PU Mesmers do well in roaming too but god kills a kitten for every Mesmer that rolls PU. It’s an awfully cheesy, low-risk build to play and I detest anyone that does.
Since the dawn of MMOs the Ranger archetype has attracted and catered to the laziest and most casual of players.
It’s an archetype that plays itself really, with pets doing most of the tanking, augmented by ranged damage from the Ranger himself, leaving him far from any danger.
This low-risk game-play allows players to progress without learning or understanding many fundamental game-mechanics. Hell, you could probably level a Ranger from 1-80 without ever dodging.
The results of creating such a class that can achieve so much with so little effort is then seen in stuff like the Marionette fight where you could count on Rangers screwing things up somehow.
This isn’t an issue unique to Guild Wars 2. The combination of pet + ranged combat has always catered a very lazy play-style. Hunters in vanilla WoW had an equally terrible reputation when it came to controlling their pets and doing anything really aside from auto-shot.
It’s not that the class can’t be good. But players playing it have to improve on their own accords because the game never asks them to. And very few bother.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
The technical frame-work of Guild Wars 2 is from 2009. Hell, it doesn’t even support DX 11, a 4 year old API.
It doesn’t utilize more than 2GB of RAM, doesn’t support 64-bit…..something that has been standard for a while now.
It’s a really poorly optimized game really, even though it does look somewhat appealing.
Would Mantle support be nice? Sure, but so would many other things.
I think it’s far more important that conditions become easier to avoid and stop being so generously applied via AoE and stuff like exploding clones.
They also need to separate damage conditions from crowd-control instead of lumping them both together.
And in general, condition removal skills, aside from a few exceptions, seem to assume you will be affected by a condition once every 5-10 seconds or so, instead of being constantly bombarded by them 24/7.
Yes, the tanky meta sucks.
Yes, Protection, Regeneration and Vigor are far too abundant.
Yes, it can be frustrating to deal with.
But none of that excuses going afk during a match and ruining any prospect for your team of having fun. That’s just incredibly selfish.
The only exception is Skyhammer. Afking that map is perfectly legitimate.
Guild Wars 2 decided to go with more standard archetypes, with the Engineer and Mesmer being the only two fairly “unique” classes to Guild Wars 2.
All others follow very established archetypes.
As others pointed out, many of the current classes incorporate themes or mechanics from Guild Wars 1 classes. Hence it is unlikely we will see a 1:1 return of any Guild Wars 1 class.
But there are still archetypes that Guild Wars 2 has to explore. Just off the top of my head i can think of the “Shaman” or “Druid” archetype. Priests could work too if they worked different enough from Guardians.
They should just replace the stacking Sigils with something else. They aren’t fun mechanics or interact with anything in an interesting way.
Procss and effects are cool, passive bonuses are not.
Yeah I’ve found the same.
The more ANet rewards us with Magic Find, the more it seems to move away from loot that is actually affected by Magic Find (unless they actually changed it).
I will admit my Pistol Whip build eats most Mesmers alive. The only ones that can escape are the PU variants with lots of Stealth and Conditions.
Eles are less of a definitive win but are instead focused for a reason. Eles deal massive AoE damage in group fights, while removing conditions and healing. They are focus target #1 for a reason.
As for Mesmers, the reason why Thieves counter them fairly hard is because both classes share a love for teleports. Mesmers rely on their teleports to survive, while Thieves can instantly close the gap again. Mesmers rely on Illusion and Phantasms, which are easily cleaved by Sword damage. Some of their spells also have cast-times, which make them susceptible to interrupts. And then the stolen ability is fairly good too.
It’s the mechanics that make Thieves counter Mesmers so hard, rather than any ability in particular being over- or underpowered.
In team play Conditions are naturally weaker because Boons and AoE removal counter them somewhat.
This is not the case is “normal”, everyday PvP that people experience in which a single condition dump can wipe them out immediately.
Whatever comps were played in the ToL simply does not affect people in any way and doesn’t really factor into the debate.
Ofcourse it factors into the debate.
You want to nerf Conditions for low-skill tiers, while they are already struggling in high-skill tiers.
If we just nerf them bluntly based on the complaints of players who simply havent learned to play against these builds yet, we are at the same time permanently shutting the door for condition builds in higher levels of play.
You cant sit here and say we’re having a balance debate when you want to exclude a whole group of players’ opinions in the matter, just because they conflict with your opinion.
I’m saying balance the game for the 98%, not the 2% who play a tournament once a year.
No game has ever succeeded or even been fun by balancing exclusively for the Top 1% of the player base who also happen to play in a slightly different environment than anyone else (in team-speak, with coordinated builds, with months of collaborative experience etc.)
And by the way, I think AoE condition removal and boon-spam is one of the first things that needs a nerf. Boon-spam in general is probably the biggest contributor the the current lame-kitten bunker meta.
In team play Conditions are naturally weaker because Boons and AoE removal counter them somewhat.
This is not the case is “normal”, everyday PvP that people experience in which a single condition dump can wipe them out immediately.
Whatever comps were played in the ToL simply does not affect people in any way and doesn’t really factor into the debate.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
I agree wholeheartedly with the OP.
Core game-play in Guild Wars 2, aside from WvW which has some redeeming qualities, is absolutely weak.
And it’s a shame, because at the core the game is good. But it’s like ANet has no concept of what to do with it, no comprehensive vision or understanding of what they hope to achieve. The core game-play is simply not evolving. And that’s just not good enough.
When I think back at my time playing WoW or SWTOR, I have a number of great memories to draw from. Memories of great moments, of great successes or embarrassing failures.
But in Guild Wars 2 I have no such thing. Even after 15.000 achievement points, 3 Legendaries and completing pretty much all of the content I find the entire experience to be very forgettable.
As said, WvW is the only exception to this and it’s embarrassing how neglected it has been.
Yeah, Engineers are super-annoying I agree. Their condi-spam is especially bad overpowered imo, while the decap nonsense at least isn’t good at killing people.
The events award 6-10 champion bags for a 10-30 minute effort that also ties you down for a while. And it’s only 10 minutes if you have a coordinated zerg, 6 commanders and not random people doing stupid stuff (like donating prematurely or trying to “assist” with other bosses, or who don’t stop DPS in time).
You can get the same rewards + miscellaneous loot by following any given champion train in any zone you like with no commitment and no coordination required.
Yeah, seasons really are a massive failure if their intent is to create some sort of competition.
It was probably never their intent to begin with. Anyone with at least half a brain (yes, that probably includes the game designers) realizes that competition in WvW is not that meaningful due to coverage/population imbalances and stuff like that. Likely, seasons are just intended to be a repacking of existing content just to add some variety and novelty to the game and from that get more people playing.
That’s what it is, of course, but calling it a “league” implies some sort of competitive notions. But that’s clearly not the case.
Any of the mega-events, the crown pavilion or just some regular world-events are considered group events.
What surprises me though is that capturing a tower in WvW is still not considered a group event even though it typically takes more than 2 players to succeed.
Yeah, seasons really are a massive failure if their intent is to create some sort of competition. I mean the entire scoring algorithm undermines any attempt to have fun and exciting matchups.
I can only recall one game that didn’t go exactly as expected during the entire season and that was due to a banking holiday.
But frankly, the flaws of the PPT system have been known for years. Since launch players have complained about how lame “night-capping” is but ANet has continued to ignore it as usual.
And now we’re at the point where no one even cares about score anymore because it’s a meaningless and hollow measure.
Why would you show a clip where you do nothing but kill Moas?
The whole Sigil-stacking mechanic is pretty lame anyway. I just wish they’d do away with it and focus on active effects and proccs.
I would like DPS meters in game but for a different reason. Not to promote (or justify) elitism, but rather to offer a practical look at theorycrafting, something tat is entirely done on spreadsheets.
Currently, if the spreadsheets says Runes of Strength > all then that’s hard to argue against even if it’s not so in practical game-play.
Runes of the Pack, Runes of Scholar etc. could all have their moments of Glory or situational advantages that currently simply aren’t reflected when just using spreadsheets.