Infantry is right.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with passive skills and easy builds. They allow new and inexperienced players to focus their attention elsewhere and still perform relatively well.
That’s a big part of “easy to learn”. That’s why the 5 Singet Warrior build of the early days wasn’t necessarily bad design.
The problem is though when these passive and “easy to learn…” builds are also the most potent in the game. Relying on passives as a clutch is ok, but having them being the best in game is not.
After all the second part of that phrase is “…hard to master.”
Active abilities always need to have more potential than passives as they can be misused. You can’t use a passive incorrectly and it can’t be countered. There’s no decision process involved in using passive skills. There is for actives so they need the higher risk/reward.
Edit: I also beg the question if we really need passive skills and singets in a game with 10-15 skills to manage when most of us players are MMO veterans and used to managing twice or three times as many skills.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
EU Silver League, 4th ranked (Abaddon’s Mouth)
-1 Mini Dolyak
-1 rare Liquid WXP flask (10.000 WXP)
-5 scrolls of knowledge
-7 Tomes of knowledge
-1 Essence of Luck (500 Luck)
-2 rare items
-roughly 4 green items
There is no counter-play and there probably never will be.
But there are counter-builds. Unfortunately the Elementalists doesn’t currently have any.
But complaining is futile. For months now the community has complained about:
- AI spam
- Visual clutter
- Passive play
- Condition pressure
- and excessive AoE damage and CC.
But instead of addressing those complaints, ANet turned around and made a series of completely random changes. Some of which address some of the aforementioned issues, but most of which do not.
It really begs the question of why have a forum if the developers are just going to balance based on their personal play-experience?
Passive abilities would be ok in an MMO with your typical 30-50 skills.
But GW2 already has a very limited skill-set. Most classes only utilize 10-15 skills. Making those passive is just lowering the already low skill-ceiling.
Passives should all be relegated to traits, but have no room in the form of active abilities. Even Singets are too passive for my linking but at least they have active effects as well.
so…what we have to do to make this happen? start to QQ on 20 pages on thread before someone start to think this may be a good idea?
kitten gonna bump this thread till a dev write here..
They did actually respond to a thread about a similar topic called “Rally – Dodgeball rules”.
They said they were interested in exploring the idea, but nothing ever came of it.
I guess when the Gem store is your main source of income designing fluff is a higher priority than fixing core game-play issues like this.
Interesting ideas.
Should the res be disabled all the time or only in certain situations (e.g. if 20+ allies are within 1000 range) is also something which should be considered. And what about Rally? Would it stay unaffected?
I think they should remove rezzing completely from WvW. I would actually leave downed state in the game but change it so that a player cannot be rallied from a death only brought up from a skill or another player.
Actually I think 1 Rally per kill is fine.
This mechanic would work in PvE as well.
It’s the whole “we finish one guy and 6 people rally somewhere 50 yards away” that makes the system so contrived an frustrating.
-No resurrecting while in combat
-Slightly slower reviving from downed-state with multiple players.
-1 Rally per kill (dodgeball rules)
Those changes combined would do a great deal for WvW and reduce the snowballing effect to a more acceptable level.
No, a puddle has more depth to it than this game.
You can say everything there is to say about the PvP in this game within a single podcast. No way anyone could dedicate a channel to it.
Sensotix has at least a few interesting class guides that might help youL https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Sensotix-Solo-Team-Q-Tactical-Guides-HD/first#post3079334
I am a pretty decent PvP players. I know my role and I can execute it well. I was iin the top 1000 before the reset if that means anything. I’m not superman and I’m not a Bunker who can carry a team, but I know my place.
But ever since the reset I have been losing roughly 70% of my games. I’d like to claim through no fault of my own.
It’s just the team I end up with are at times just useless or the enemy just stacks more Necros and Warriors than us. Either that or I am left with 3 Thieves on my team who can’t contribute meaningfully to team-fights because they are instant-gibbed by AoE damage.
I was pretty close to a 50/50 win/lose ratio before the reset but since then it’s been god kitten awful.
What changed about match-making that makes it such a pita?
Ok, Perplexity Runes have been a bane of WvW fora while now. Even after the most recent nerf they are still the most powerful runes for a number of stun-heavy builds. Mostly Warriors and these god-awful perma-stealth Mesmers.
The kicker is, these Runes exist solely to troll people in WvW.
Confusion as a condition is nigh useless in PvE and the runes weren’t added to sPvP (thank god for that much foresight).
Did we really meed a Rune set that gave CC cleaver even more offensive pressure?
There is no good reason to have this huge difference in HP.
It’s obviously something they decided on long ago and have never gone back to reconsider it.
It’s a poor design decision, making it impossible to balance PvE properly. It’s probably why we’ve become so accustomed to one-hit-kills in PvE.
PvP isn’t better for it either. Guardians and Eles could easily be slightly less tanky if they had 2000 more base HP. Thieves could be slightly less bursty with 2000 more HP.
I’m not saying that we need to equalize the HP entirely, but the difference between 10800 HP and 18.300 HP is too kitten large to ever achieve proper balance.
just requiring you to be out of combat to res a finished player would be enough and would make a huge difference imo.
Amen, the constant resurrecting of dead players really hurts any tactical depth this game may have. When the larger force has the time and players to constantly resurrect their fallen, what hope can you truly have to prevail?
Downed-State is bad enough as a snowballing mechanic. In combat resurrecting just adds further insult to injury.
They need more reactive moves like in Daoc.
So if you evade/block, a weapon style becomes available.
That’s kind of already the case except you don’t need to manually activate the move.
Yeah I was hoping we might see something like that once they rework some of our weapon sets. But that seems like further away now than ever…
The 13% is old data and doesn’t say much about how it was gathered.
I’d imagine today quite a number of accounts have one of each class so what classes are played is far more relevant than how many exist.
The “FotM” effect is also highly exaggerated by players (at least in WvW).
I took a break from the game at rank 23 or so back in February. I came back in June and have been playing SoloQ for about an hour a day since then.
I only recently reached level 30.
So no, unless these changes need 4 months to roll out there’s no way you’ll reach rank 30 in time.
There was some debate about this on reddit recently too. People theorized that now that the rarity of the item has been changed (it’s now considered rare iirc) that this also affected the salvage rate.
Personally I can’t really confirm or deny if it has been buffed. Subjectively I seem to get a few more Runes and Sigils than I used to…but not significantly more.
The reason most people ignore Critical Haste is because it throws off your timings. Dagger/Dagger for example might cast a Cloak and Dagger too quickly, thus wasting valuable initiative and thus DPS.
It’s slightly less problematic on Sword/Pistol and Pistol/Pistol but there too it also increases your Initative usage which is just not sustainable. There are typically better DPS traits that don’t come at the cost of Initative.
I’ve kittening had it with this bullkitten trait. I can’t believe how many times it’s got me killed.
Fix this kitten already. It’s not like we haven’t complained about it from day 1.
kitten it makes we want to smash my monitor at times.
/vent
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
I don’t see why you would use a Dagger over a Sword in most PvE content. I have found Sword + Pistol to be the far better weapon-set in most PvE scenarios. Exception being when you only have one target and need to move a lot.
Anyway, it’s hard to argue against the Shortbow, just because it gets so much use. That’s the reason it was my Legendary of choice, rather than your standard Daggers/Swords or Pistols.
1200 range is necessary in all game modes if only because it helps you do what flanking is meant to do: get you away from melee enemies while still dealing some degree of damage, and possibly causing your enemy to overextend or flee.
1200 range is very unnecessary in pve, im all for forcing everyone to have a max of 600 range in pve
Run all fractals @ level 40 without using ranged weapons and color me impressed.
Until then ranged weapons are a mandatory element of PvE many encounters.
You can argue about what’s necessary and what’s not since most of the stuff in this game is either easy or doesn’t punish you for failure.
But still a Thief loses quite a bit of his DPS due to his 900 range limitation. And I just don’t see any justification for it.
GW2 lauded itself with the fact that it didn’t build upon the holy trinity, and thus did not feature tanks.
That’s fine.
But the lack of tanking also meant the absence of any direct forms of threat management. There seems to be some hidden formula that dictates which player the mob is going to attack, but it’s at least partially random and completely unpredictable.
And yet despite the unpredictable nature of threat in this game, quite a number of encounters require you to accurately kite mobs to specific locations.
Case and point being Mai Tee where she needs to be positioned in the Captain’s AoE.
In a normal MMO this would be a pretty standard and straight-forward task. But GW2 lacks any form of aggro or threat management so positioning a boss accurately is nigh impossible unless everyone bunches up all the time (which in turn makes combat static and boring).
There are a number of other bosses that require accurate kiting, like the endboss of the Dredge fractal and to an extent, even the Imbued Shaman.
I wish ANet would give us the tools to handle these boss-fights more accurately instead of having to either bunch op or just hope the boss doesn’t change his mind every two seconds.
If that’s not possible then at least make aggro more transparent and controllable and not so “whimsical”. I mean does a boss really have to change his/her mind every three seconds about who to attack?
They need to do something about the rings. They keep adding more and more into the economy with no way to remove them. That’s just bad design.
There are countless ways to deal with this issue and any solution is better than nothing.
I recall reading somewhere that something like 75% of the player base in a F2P MMO will never spend a dime on the game, no matter how hard you try.
20 % will occasionally invest in some very targeted purchases but 5%…..the ones with a complete lack of self-control, the “Whales” as they are referred to, contribute something like 60% of the revenue.
So the Lion Share of content that is created is aimed at these “Whales” because they spend by far the most money.
If I had 20 slots to fill with any class, and my goal was to burst blobs, I’d pick:
- 6 Warriors
- 4 Guardians
- 2 Mesmers
- 3 Elementalists
- 2 Necromancers
- 1 Ranger
- 1 Thief
- 1 Engineer
Edit: In retrospect those last three classes really server no purpose. Replace them with another 2 Necros and an Elementalist.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
1200 range is the de facto standard range around which everything is balanced.
The recent implementation of new fractals and the corresponding new encounters further cement that.
Thieves already had very little going for them in terms of Fractal progression and now the 900 range limit is becoming a real issue. Our range DPS options are limited as it is and I don’t see how ANet can continue justifying limiting Thieves to 900 range.
Two of the three new final encounters practically require ranged DPS and the range is a real issue here.
I mean in WvW we can barely shoot down a wall and in Fractals we can’t reach bosses because of all the kiting required. How is that fair and acceptable?
At least the Pistols could do with 1200 range as they don’t have much going for them.
If you try to balance the classes the teams will mostly be less balanced regarding rating, bad idea imo. Good players usually have different professions to swap to and if you play with bad people it doesnt matter too much anyways.
This may be true in really high ratings but for the middle of the ladder, class composition is far more decisive than some minor differences in personal rating.
The fact that 2 of your players have a slightly higher rating won’t matter much when your team consists of 3 Thieves, a Mesmer and an Elementalist and your opponent is boasting 2 Necros, 2 Warriors and a Guardian.
My point being, class should be a factor and a more important factor than personal rating.
There really isn’t a huge skill-ceiling in this game anyway and so personal rating doesn’t matter that much.
There was a thread a while ago where we discussed the possibility of “dodge ball rules” when it comes to Rally. So 1 Kill = 1 Rally.
A Dev chimed in stating they may consider it for a custom game mode, but nothing ever came of it. A shame really since the whole downed-state/rally mechanic is by far the most broken mechanic in this game.
I think balance will be better after the patch.
But it changes very little about how the patch ignores glaring issues like Healing Singet and other elements of passive play.
So much passive play in a game with 10-15 abilities to manage on most classes is a joke.
4 vs. 5 is by far the most frustrating thing about SoloQ.
But second to that is the dumb class distribution.
About 1/4th of my games will be with 3 Thieves in my team, while the enemy team has none. Instead they will have 2 Warriors, 2 Necros and a Spirit Ranger, none of which are represented in my team.
In what world does that make sense?
Why is it so hard to get the classes equally distributed across the teams. I’m not even asking for the game to differentiate between a Bunker and a DPS build. I just want it to understand that giving one team 3 Warriors and the other 0 is dumb.
I just don’t want to be stuck with 3 of the same class on my team while the enemy has multiple of the other classes of which we have none.
And no, this is even before anyone re-loggs onto a different character.
Maybe we should accept that GW2 has a comparatively low skill-cap, especially when it comes to mastering a class. Sure, situational awareness and class knowledge factor in as well but when it comes to actual play, there’s not a huge difference between someone in the top 200 and someone in the top 600.
Random factors outside of your control play too much of a role when it comes to determining success.
So we can easily reach the point where we can say, X is just as good as Y.
I know we like to think there are always differences in skill and that Y is so much better than X, but the tools GW2 gives the players are far too limited to make such a clear distinction.
I concur that the Dredge Fractal has too much “padding”.
“Padding” is something I define as tedious because it’s not putting a new twist on something I already know.
The initial puzzle for example is fine. It requires coordination and timing. Not easy without TS, but fair.
Blowing up the door is somewhat tedious depending on your class setup. But at least it gives Thieves a way to shine and allows you to used skills in ways you might not normally use them. I agree that there are still too many Dredge and they respawn too much.
The following Boss Fight and Clown Car on the other hand are just useless padding. The Boss doesn’t have a single interesting mechanic and killing waves of Dredge isn’t cool either. It’s not like we haven’t been doing that for the entire duration of the fractal.
The following elementals and the endboss are fine again. They have an interesting mechanic and a fair, but not unreasonable amount of HP.
The other big offender in terms of padding are the Harpies in the Asura Fractal. Imo they are worse than Dredge because the fractal is so buggy (random deaths) and the constant unfair knockbacks cost much more time. Killing a dozen of these Harpies every time gets old really quickly.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)
Damage vs. survivability is a little broken, especially on some builds.
The problem is that survivability can easily reach a break-even point where it outscales damage.
So for example, an extreme glass-cannon build might be dealing 2000 DPS on average.
A Bunker build will still be dealing…say 400 DPS. However the Bunker will be able to mitigate 80% of the damage thrown at him by cycling immunities and maintaining Protection and Vigor.
That damage that does go through is then simply outhealed.
That’s how you end up with some of these nigh unkillable bunkers, especially among Engineers, Warriors, Elementalists (not so much in sPvP) and Guardians.
Defense just simply outscales offense in this game. And the kicker is that a Bunker can still deal respectable Condition damage if he/she wants to.
I’m laughing at this matchup.
In the first week Desolation had the choice between handing Abaddon’s Mouth or Gandara the 2nd place.
And they sided with Gandara.
Now that decision has come back to bite them in the kitten .
I hope they lose their first place to Gandara. That would satisfy my Schadenfreude.
OP is absolutely right.
The fact that you can resurrect dead players right there in the middle of a siege, even with arrow carts bombarding you, and with 4 players it only takes a few seconds, makes blobs almost entirely unkillable.
It’s by far the most insulting mechanic for undermanned server.
But ANets inability to see their flaws on their own mechanics probably means this will never change.
I believe the down state exists because of the lack of a true healing class
This is true for PvE.
The entire mechanic was conceived and balanced around PvE. Rallying even makes sense there.
But it utterly ruins PvP. They just copy + pasted the mechanic without really thinking through the consequences, subsequently creating the worst mechanic I have ever witnessed in an MMO.
The fact that you are playing the score-board proves you are a bad player OP.
This level of passive play would be acceptable in an MMO that had players use more skills.
But in GW2 it’s borderline insulting to have builds relying on so much passive play when there are only 10-15 abilities to even manage.
When you use Singet of Spite we counter with Lyssa Runes.
The condition cleanse is the reason we use them.
Ahm no,
people are just pursuing different activities now compared to months ago.
In PvE champion farming is in, event-farming, even world bosses…is out.
sPvP has always been out.
WvW is more popular than ever, even with the Season coming to a close.
Removing downed state would be a good start.
Yes, addressing downed-state, limiting resurrections to out of combat and changing the rally-mechanic to dodge-ball rules (1 rally for 1 kill) would help a lot.
What might also help is if Swiftness was not so easily applyable through combo-fields. That may slow down a zerg, where you have Swiftness 90% of the time, and give individuals more time to react.
But honestly I don’t think it would have a huge effect.
If you already are revealed when it triggers then it should have no effect whatsoever.
One might have thought that fixing such controversial traits might be a priority but instead they insist of messing about with our initiative regeneration and other things instead of fixing what’s really broken.
God I kittening hate this map and whoever created it. It’s an insult to any competitive notion PvP ever had in this game.
I don’t know how any competent designer could tolerate the unanimous hate of skyhammer and still force players to play it on a regular basis.
I’d rather engage in underwater combat than endure any more of this god awful map.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed “Sic’Em” being used for the desired effect.
Changing the Rally/Revive mechanics would really be the best way to limit the power of the Zerg.
But that would require ANet to revisit some of their fundamental design concepts.
I don’t really agree with the OP.
Yes if 80 is your goal and you set out to achieve it asap, then yes, leveling can be a little slow. But only if you look at it from an absolute perspective.
Unlike most MMOs, leveling in GW2 doesn’t exclude you from most content. Sure, you might not have access to exotic gear but you can still partake in dungeons and most events. Getting there….aka map exploration is really what is holding people back.
1. Downed-State, especially in PvP. This is simply by far the worst thing about GW2.
2. Passive balancing. The pace of change is simply too slow.
3. Lack of coherent endgame progression system. Countless currencies and their lack of implementation really show that ANet has no coherent concept for endgame loot acquisition.
4. Loot focused endgame. Endgame in GW2 is all about maximizing loot efficiency, not overcoming challenges.
5. The engine. Tiny maps, no view-distance, lag issues etc. The engine clearly isn’t well suited for an MMO.
1. Animations
2. Art Design
3. Buy to Play
4. WvW concept (despite many issues like small maps and shallow game-play)
5. Dynamic Events (much better than standard quests, despite many issues).
Wait what, a game starts sooner if everyone clicks “I am ready”?
Today I learned….
The following, typical scenario:
You’ve just completed your dungeon run. It took some time and there were a few wipes but you got the endboss in the end.
All is good and everyone leaves happily after the final battle.
You realize that your inventory is full and start salvaging some stuff to make room for the boss loot……only to have your group leader disband the group and kick you out of the instance.
No Loot for you!
I can’t really blame anyone for this. It’s not the group leaders fault for not waiting. How was he supposed to know I wasn’t done yet. He probably didn’t even realize he was the group leader because it doesn’t matter.
Then why do we still have this stupid mechanic that somehow ties dungeons to individuals. It makes no sense and doesn’t offer any benefit. It just results in odd and frustrating situations like the one above.
Change it. That final boss might have had my precursor.