Guild Wars 2

We can’t have an objective debate about Warriors balance as long as Healing Signet and Adrenal Healing are ticking away for over 600 HPS. That’s just ridiculous. It turns every Block, every immunity and every evade into a 1-4k heal.

Yes, other things are probably OP too but nothing comes close to the passive healing. And until we see it nerfed/changed we can’t really objectively kitten other imbalances.

Why the kitten would they mess with a Fractal that was both fine in difficulty and length? Sure the reliance on NPCs was annoying, as were the untelegraphed instant-gib AoEs by the NPC Elementalists but overall it was just that…..fine.

And now they messed with it for no good reason….wth?

I agree it’s too strong a Rune-set, especially on builds that deal both Power and Condition damage (Hambow, Eles, etc.).

The damage bonus in itself is strong, but what really pushes it over the top is the added Might duration and how it enables solo-stacking of Might up to 20 and more on a regular basis. That’s not ok.

What does that have to do with anything? Is Burst a problem? No! Do many builds run perma-Fury? No! So who cares?

90% of the time S/P ist your best choice for PvE. It has cleave, evades, damage and most importantly Black Powder for Blind fields.

D/D is the signature weapon set and what all Thieves naturally lean towards at first. But it really fills a very small niche of single-target DPS with litte/no utility that I find myself switching to it very rarely.

Thankfully the builds between the two don’t vary much so switching is easy and quick.

But yeah, S/P + Shortbow should have you covered for most of PvE. Still, you should acquire every weapon-set eventually just so you can be flexible when needed.

OP has a point although it’s a bit of a broad issue.

To be more specific, I think that, for example, the amount of Regeneration and _Protection available to many of the bunker-builds is far, far too abundant.

I mean bunker Rangers can achieve something like 50+% uptime of both these Boon, combined with lots and lots of Evades. PU Mesmers achieve a similar uptime of these two boons, albeit they are less common in sPvP.

Engineers also have a very high Protection uptime, thanks to their auto-procc and Guardians are basically rolling in all Boons all of the time, just like Elementalists.

The abundance of Boons is fundamentally broken. A 30% damage reduction is an extremely powerful boon. Having it auto-applied every few seconds is just a broken mechanic. No amount of boon removal will ever be able to keep up with the rate at which boons are applied, especially not in group-fights where many boons are shared.

Fix boon spam and we get a step closer to a better meta.

Posting in the daily Skyhammer rage thread.

I’ve gotten so frustrated running my Thief in anything but small-scale WvW. As soon as there are more than 10 enemy players on the screen I seem to die instantly due to random, untargted damage or CC. It’s fekkin annoying and the singe biggest reason for me to reroll a Warrior.

You might do reasonably well if you build you Thief specifically for zerging…aka Soldier gear, Signet of Malice and Omnomberry Pie. But really this is a big investment for a single aspect of the game you’re really better off rolling something else.

I play D/P in WvW so that impacts my perception of other classes.

Generally though:

Warrior – not hard, although some are down-right immortal thanks to Healing Signet and Adrenal Healing. Generally the Blind spam counters most Warrior builds pretty hard but you have to watch out for those 12k Eviscerates.

Guardian – Most play some sort of tanky immortal build too. DPs Guardians can be extremely though to kill…or rather easy. Not sure why, but there seems to be a lot of variance.

Rangers – Most Rangers are crappy players and will kill themselves by shooting at Daggerstorm. Anything with a bow, except for Spirit Rangers, is generally a free-kill. The melee Rangers are generally immortal too and best avoided which is easy enough since they deal very little damage.

Engineers – Probably the most annoying class to fight in this game. Incredibly overpowered condition spam combined with a bunker/avoidance play-style make this class incredibly OP in roaming situations.

Thieves – D/P is probably the best Thief-build for dueling so it comes out on top more often than not. Some builds can be tougher than others but Blind spam is simply too hard a counter for most.

Mesmers – PU has turned into a cancer for this class. 95% of Mesmers seem to run some form of it and it is fekkin lame. When combined with condition spam it marks the pinnacle of low-risk/high-reward condition-spam game-play that has all but ruined active combat. I despise this build and what it has done to an otherwise interesting class. So no, I can’t beat PU Mesmers and don’t even try anymore. Just walk away…

Necromancers – can be tough. They have so much HP to beat through. But they have a number of builds as well, including condi-spam and Minion Masters. Both can be tough or easy, depending on the other player. In general though I don’t have a hard time killing them unless I eat a Signet of Spite.

Elementalists – are a wild card. Some are incredibly hard, borderline OP with good damage and insane sustain, while others are just…meh. I have met and fought some pretty good Eles, but killed plenty more easy kills. 9/10 times I will come out on top.

I watched a single Burn condition applied by an Engineer via auto-attack deal 7000 damage to me, without +40% condition duration.

This is a condition applied by a fekkin auto-attack and has practically no animation or telegraph.

I mean wtf? Add other conditions on top of that and you can easily melt to half a dozen conditions in 8 seconds while the condi-spam builds run nice bunker-builds on top of that.

And to top it off, most of these conditions are AoE as well meaning you’re constantly being harassed by them in an unavoidable fashion.

After downed-state this low-risk/high-reward condi-spam game-play is the second most kittened thing about this game’s balance.

Ade active combat. It was fun while it lasted.

Guardians pushed out of meta?

Never. That class alone is responsible for the entire bunker-meta in the first place and turns all team-mates into immortal heroes as soon as it joins a fight.

I agree that this is probably the kittentiest and lamest meta we’ve ever had dominated by low-risk/high reward builds with perma Protection, Vigor and Regeneration that simply refuse to die.

This map has become the antithesis to “collaborative development”.

Ok, since the Megaserver patch this Temple event has been kittening me off.

It’s gone from being one of my favorite, to the most detested temple event in the game.

Thus far the only viable and pug-friendly way of doing the temple has been ignoring the shades and zerging down the Priest asap. But that “tactic” requires a certain critical mass of players. But given how unpopular the event is now, it rarely gets this type of attention anymore, meaning you’re left with maybe a dozen or so players trying to do it.

Then you have actual issues like:
1. Priest constantly resets and heals back up, even with players still in combat near him.
2. Even when the Priest resets, the Shades don’t despawn. So any reset essentially forces you to reset because you can’t deal with all the shades.
3. Shades have way, way, way, way, way, way, way too much HP. It feels like each shade has more HP than the bloody Fallen Prest. No surprise everyone ignores them because it would take AGES to kill them all.
4. Constantly being instant-gibbed with form of feedback. I know you drop dead once you reach 25 stacks of whatever, but avoiding these stacks is close to impossible. They seem to stack at random with no clear telegraph to avoid.

And NOTHING is as frustrating in PvE as these constant kittening instant-gib mechanics.

In short, this temple event sucks hard, especially since the megaservers. You need to change the shade mechanic to something more intuitive and forgiving.

A time-limit wouldn’t hurt either so that after 30 minutes of rezzing, running, instant-gib, people might actually realize they’ve lost.

PS: Here’s an idea for new mechanics that would make the whole thing less frustrating.

1. Priest of Grenth has a Shield that absorbs 99% of damage.
2. Players penetrate this shield by killing shades that spawn from the portals.
3. Killing shades allows players to deal more damage, but also makes them more vulnerable to the Priest’s attacks.
4. Players have 7 minutes to kill the Priest before the event fails.

Result: players must balance stacking penetration vs. higher susceptibility to damage, all while killing the Priest in time. Fairly intuitive, instant-gibs depend on player choice, flexible tactics…..less raging. Win/Win.

Reddit is a place that rewards fluff content and ANet praise.

It does have occasional useful information but most of the time it’s just people repeating what they like hearing/reading.

I agree that Runes of Strength are probably a little strong overall.

But I’d rather see crappy Runes buffed than popular ones nerfed. Because objectively Strength Runes only really add DPS. And I’m sure other things matter too.

They should start by rebuffing Runes of Lyssa. Other Runes could also be buffed.

In general I think it would be better if ANet moves away from static damage increases and instead promoted more “utility” effects, rather than just raw damage.

It seems like you guys mist my point entirely.

I wasn’t complaining about either class specifically.

But if you have two Zerker builds that can’t kill each other because of insane sustain from various traits then something is pretty broken. I can understand stalemates when you have two Bunkers duking it out, but Berserkers? I don’t think that’s ok.

Welcome to Guild Wars 2 sPvP.

Where Bunker Guardians have dominated the meta since launch and no one has ever considered changing that.

Not only are they immortal 1v1, they also make their team nigh-immortal once they join the fight.

Probably the most conceptually broken class in the game. No wonder 40% of WvW guilds are made up of Guardians.

Tachii.3506:

Why on crit sigils when you only have like 39% crit rate? Wouldn’t Sigil of Force be better?

Because most of these Sigils are limited by an internal cooldown anyway and Pistol Whip attacks fast enough to procc it reliably. 40% Crit-chance or 80% crit-chance won’t make a huge difference when it comes to proccing the Sigils.

And the reason you take them at all is for the added burst, no necessarily the DPS.

Anyway, I tested the build an it worked quite well. I don’t have a competitive team so I can’t really comment on that but it did work reasonably well. And that long immobilize catches a lot of people off guard.

But survivability is probably as low as it gets.

GW2 “endgame” is essentially a giant gold farming contest.

Gold gets you nearly everything you want and in order to get something you want, you need to farm it. And since you can’t actively farm specific mats or items you just farm “gold”.

That’s why thousands of people train the mega-events all day. For loot/gold. Or do you think people really find it “fun” to auto-attack bosses to death while on their desktop?

So I was roaming today on my full zerker Warrior.

I came across a roaming Guardian, also full zerker. We fought each other…..for about 4 minutes….before both going our way.

None could even get close to killing the other. My Warrior was sustained by Adrenal Healing and Healing Signet. A few seconds of kiting after being hit by burst and I’d be safe again.

The Guardian on the other hand always seemed to have some sort of cooldown ready whenever he dropped close to 20% and was constantly able to pick himself back up.

I don’t really want to point out any imbalances in particular, but if two Full Zerkers can’t even kill each other, then balance is pretty out-of-whack.

TehHobNob.4687:

Also. I want your opinions! Should It be possible to down someone else using one skill? I know I am super glassy d/p but still I would like the input. Should this be a thing?

Originally I would have said no. In fact GW2 is the only MMO where you can be literally “one-hit” and it use to frustrate me a lot too.

But these builds sacrifice a lot to deal such damage and are themselves “one-hit” victims. Also after the Ferocity nerf these have become increasingly rare.

So while overall I still don’t think it’s good game-design to have “one-shots”, in the larger scale of things I think it’s ok. In fact, given the current meta, I think a more bursty game-play would do it some good.

Will test it later today. I would not have though of combining deep Deadly Arts with Pistol Whip.

But with no condition removal whatsoever……life is going to suck for players not in organized groups.

Well one thing to consider is burst. Force might add more DPS compared to Air, but Air adds burst. And burst kills in PvP, not DPS.

That’s why I think Air is the undisputed Sigil for burst-builds.

Basically the key to progressing through fractals is avoiding the difficult instabilities and sticking to the easy ones.

I think I progressed from 38-45 entirely by doing Fractal 49.

It’s an organisational challenge. You need to coordinate multiple groups with multiple roles and some very specific tasks.

For the individual participants it’s not particularly challenging if they can follow orders.

I don’t think it would. It doesn’t make sense for it to do so given how the unlocks work.

PU Mesmer.

PU Mesmer and Engineer make for the worst type of condition spam you can imagine.

They are also both semi-viable targets and can share a lot of the attention you may get. Mask is right when he says that any class that runs with a Thief essentially has to tank all the attention because players don’t like focusing on stealth-classes.

Now PU Mesmers have their Illusions to spam and distract their enemies and draw some of their attention while still being fairly slippery themselves.Their Phantasms and Illusions also create a lot of visual “noise” which can be helpful in chaotic WvW environments. Both Mesmer and Engineer will be playing fairly durable builds and their condition-spam augments each other.

I’ve seen this in action once. It was a nightmare.

Even my Hambow alt with all the abundant condition removal melts like hot butter in the sun to this type of condi-spam. It’s insane.

It’s a non-stop barrage of all types of conditions, including blinds and Confusion. There’s nothing to specifically dodge either since all of their attacks can apply these condis.

Imo the amount and degree of conditions Engineers can constantly spam is broken. Not just unbalanced….fundamentally broken.

If you played a Warrior you’d know how rarely that damage boost actually takes effect.

How often do you really hit a stunned target, aside from the stuns themselves? That’s right, not much.

With most stuns the effect expires (or is broken) by the time the next hit connects. So the damage increase is really only effective for the initial stunning hits, of which only Backbreaker and Earthshaker hit hard.

And a 20% damage increase on those two skills is hardly something to write home about. People pick the trait for the cooldown reduction. The damage bonus is nice, but fairly irrelevant in the grander scale of things.

If we say Sigil of Bloodlust adds 10% DPS by adding 250 Power then it makes sense to assume that every stack of Might adds 1.4% DPS.

So in order for Sigil of Strength to trump Sigil of Force it would need to add > 3 stacks at all times. Sigil of Strength has a 60% procc chance on crit and a 1 second icd. The Might provided by that Sigil lasts 10 seconds (13 seconds with Runes of Strength).

With full Berserker gear a Thief should have an effective crit-chance of at least 60%, even when running solo and without Fury. The auto-attack chain lasts 2.25 seconds and about 1/3rd of attacks are going to procc the effect. It seems reasonable to assume 1 Might stack for every auto-attack chain.

Since the Might lasts 10+ seconds I can easily see it maintaining more than 3 stacks, especially with Strength Runes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it outperformed Sigil of Force in terms of practical DPS.

For me PvE really lacks a real structure.

Endgame in GW2 is essentially just a massive gold-farming grind in pursuit of whatever you currently want. There is no sense of progression, no sense of accomplishment, no sense of challenge.

There’s also no structure to rewards. Doing 5 min of auto-attacks while being on your desktop can prove to be more rewarding than 2 hours of FotM level 50. 5 Minutes running around Orr spaming AoE into zerg-events will yield you better loot than a dungeon run.

There’s no correlation between risk and reward, investment and return.

ANet really need to take a look at their loot system and PvE content. They need to decide what type of content deserves what kind of reward and what is a fair ratio of risk/reward?

While browsing through my achievement panel looking for low-hanging fruit I realized I hadn’t triggered a lot of the hints yet.

So I went about creating each of the classes I was still lacking in order to trigger those hints.

However with the Ranger class I seem a bit stuck. Despite having tamed two juvenile pets already I can’t seem to trigger the hint for “press F to tame”. I also can’t seem to trigger the “press F4 to switch pets” hint either.

I’m already level 7, have relogged, completed story chapters etc. I’m not sure what else to do. How can I trigger these hints?

I’ve met some Eles in sPvP that would 1v1 even Hambows with relative ease.

I’m not sure what it is specifically but some Ele builds hvae INSANE sustain, more so than even Healing Signet + Adrenal Healing. Tbh it feels a bit broken at times. I don’t think it’s ok for a class to be constantly rolling in boons, dealing good Power and Condi damage at the same time, and then being able to heal up to full every 14 seconds or so.

I hated decap Engis before the patch. but have had less issues with them since then. It seems like either less people are running pure decap builds or the builds just aren’t that strong anymore.

I think the condi-spam builds are far more problematic.

More than anything, sPvP needs to be fun, even if you’re not winning.

In all other MMOs fun can be found and had, even in lost matches.

In GW2 winning isn’t that much fun in the first place, but losing is just down-right frustrating with the snowballing that happens after the first mid-fight is lost.

I like Dynamic Events more than questing.

But Megaevents are best left to actual raids.

It was a nice experiment to bring “raid content” into the open world but it has failed, failed completely. Instead it highlights the bad stuff about raiding and leaves out the good.

Just one of the many absolutely kittened things about downed-state.

Add it to the list.

Ascended Rings, T7 mats and various souldbound runes.

ANet loves filling up your inventory with redundant crap. I guess it helps them sell bank-slots.

In terms of DPS Power > Precision > Ferocity.

But that’s assuming there are no traits like Hidden Killer that devalue Precision and emphasize Ferocity.

If you are running something like a Valkyrie + Hidden Killer build Ferocity can be a good choice. But nothing ever comes close to trumping Power.

I think Power may even add more Critical Strike damage than Ferocity.

Do I need a guild invite to participate in the kill? I am keen to finally get around to killing the Wurm after multiple half- kitten d attempts back in January.

Shadow Arts has soooooo many good traits that add survivability and longevity, all just in Tier 1.

Shadow’s Embrace
Shadow Protector
Infusion of Shadows
Master of Deception
Cloaked in Shadows
etc.

are all great traits and easily outperform many other traits for other trees. They also tend to add stuff Thieves would otherwise be lacking like reliable condition removal. It’s possible but difficult to get by without them, especially considering how little real utility many of the other traits lines add.

It’s a truly terrible and annoying trait, especially with D/D.

It has been complained about on many occasions. But like most justified complaints, it has been completely ignored by ANet.

It’s less problematic on other weapon-sets like D/P, which is why I haven’t raged about the trait in a while.

If it wasn’t for the same match-ups over and over again I would have completely forgotten that we currently even have a WvW season.

It does seem odd that EotM would be so much more rewarding than regular WvW. I mean the badges alone are just completely out of whack.

I use Air for the Mainhand Dagger and Force for the Offhand.

Afaik the Offhand Sigil only proccs if you use a corresponding attack. So Air will only procc with attacks 1-3 and whatever you have on your offhand, only from 3-5. But I’m not entirely sure about that.

Anyway, the reason for Air on mainhand is simply for the added Backstab burst. You want it to apply as much pressure as possible and Air helps with that.

That’s also the reason I opted for Force, since that also helps boost Backstab damage. But you could also argue for other Sigils. My concern about those would be though if you use 3-5 frequently enough to procc them reliably.

It would be dump to have Fire on the Offhand and then only procc it ever 10 seconds or so.

Bunker Guardians are the most broken class, on a design level.

People don’t complain about them because they don’t WTFPWN in 1v1.

But there is a reason Bunker Guardians probably have the highest win-rate in SoloQ.
There is a reason why roughly 40% of guild-zergs are stacked with Guardians.
There is a reason no competitive sPvP team has ever run without at least one Bunker Guardian.
There is a reason why no other class has had a chance to compete for the place of “mid bunker”.
There is a reason why nobody dies in team-fights anymore once Guardians are involved.
There is a reason why Conditions are OP in small-scale but weak in Zerg-fights.

The reason is Guardian group support. It is by far the most broken design-aspect of all classes in this game and influences the meta in the most negative way. Moreso than even FotM builds like Hambow or whatever else is currently popular.

Well that’s a surprisingly concrete answer. Still a bug, but at least now I know how to avoid it.

vincecontix.1264:

viralthefrog.6130:

If you hate the RNG in this game, you’re gonna have a bad time playing any other MMORPG.

This +200 alot worse in many other mmorpg its actually not that bad in this game at all.

Except it’s not.

I just spent 2 hours doing Fractals 49 in a Pug. We had Swamp, Cliffside, Dredge Fractal and the Molten Duo. It was a time consuming, and somewhat tedious experience. And for what?

1 Gold and 40 Silver.

Roughly the same reward I would have gotten for zerging AC in 15 minutes.

That’s bollux. Absolutely bollux. This game has no correlation between risk/reward or any sort of loot-tiering.

You can get the same amount and quality of loot for zerging around in Orr, doing Champ trains or FotM or auto-shotting your way through mega-events. It’s an abyssal way to reward people for their efforts.

FotM can be hard, frustrating and punishing, especially if you’re in a PuG. The rewards need to reflect that or why even bother?

I was playing a dozen or so games of Southsun survival today to fill up my achievement.

However I noticed that some games would simply not be counted towards it and I would receive no reward, despite obvious and significant contribution.

One game where I came out on top and won wasn’t counted either, for no obvious reason.

I find this very frustrating and can’t explain why it happens.

Ascended Weapons feel like a middle ground. But armor is just way too costly and time-consuming to be considered a “middle ground”. Especially once you add infusions into the mix.

GW2 in general has a huge problem with its reward system. 99.999% of loot you find feels worthless. Blues, Greens and most trash drops, which the game swamps you with at every corner, have no residual value left to them. They are all essentially “junk”.

Rare items are the only items that feel both rewarding, while still being a relatively common drop.

Exotics are very uncommon drops but so common from other sources (crafting and badges) that they ultimately feel unrewarding.

Ascended materials on the other hand are way too abundant again since they are rewarded for EVERYTHING.

Ascended drops on the other hand are so incredibly rare that you may well never see one.

It’s like ANet can’t seem to balance their loot at all. Crafting and badges undermine the value of exotics completely while it’s commonplace to run 1-2 hours through Fractals 49, only to come out with nothing more than 1-2 rares and a bunch of “junk”. Something you could have easily gotten by auto-shot-afking 2 megaevents.

Case point, GW2 loot system is crap and very unsatisfying.