Guild Wars 2

For some reason matches have been much less enjoyable for some reason :\

Alot of 5v4s, unbalanced share of classes, and new players vs experienced players..

Justin ODell.9517:

We have several plans being implemented right now that are aimed at increasing the number of players.

Any of these plans are aimed into balance correctly? active play instead of passive? conditions not replacing direct damage n’ so on?

Thiefs are a natural counter to mesmers.. besides chaos storm mesmers don’t have any other ground target skill except GS#3 which is completely worthtless if you can’t see your target.

Engineers and necros can just spam their bombs/nades/wells/minions and let the thief get owned by it. And if you tell me that all the mesmer has to do is spawn his illusions that they will kill the thief once he pops are just kittened since 1 clusterbomb and they’re all gone, if the thief do the same against a spirit ranger for example, he’s going to get exploded by the pets.

I’m honestly done with spvp till next patch and then we’ll see what kind of balance this brings -__-

This new MM is terrible… just saying. I keep getting new players into my queues its kittened. They have NO idea what to do, they try zerg… clearly new players all the while i’m fighting experienced players e v e r y s i n g l e match.

Dsybok.1405:

I personally don’t like to lose. I prefer to win. I guess you don’t much care about that.

What are you talking about? I’ve won pretty much this entire week, wiping zergs with a 5 man, kiting a whole bunch of FC/AR into Ogrewatch just now before the reset in EB and wiping all of them, and before that me and a guardian kept wiping FC between the Hylek village and your supply camp. Kept my 25 stacks the whole playtime… not even one death.

Mesmer from Oz.

Ps: Oh you talking about having coverage win? Well, that’s boring, unskilled and non-challenging my friend.
Ps2: To the warrior from AR around Ogrewatch fighting against us and some FC, good times!

Dsybok.1405:

Wow, that’s all it was? Seems like an awfully stupid thing to do when your server is fighting for 2nd place and only a few thousand points separate you with a day to go. I guess that is T8 for ya.

You might have missed the memo but… ya know… most of the people give no kittens about WvW rank or position. Alot of ET people do whatever pleases them at the moment, no kittens were given about score or anything.

We gangsters.

savov.3712:

Hey Select! I know that mate, thanks!
Maybe, that’s even one of the reasons I haven’t seen in in the mists for some time now… the same reasons, you wont see me either.
But I’m always up for some WvWing… want to work towards the season key, and get disappointing with the rewards, first handed.

Yeah, pretty much. I transfered to NA to play WvW with some friends and soloq from time to time.. just to get very disappointed at each Skyhammer pop and balance in general between the classes :p

Lordrosicky.5813:

pedrst.3127:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Writetyper.1985:

I wish they’d just nerf healing signet slightly or change it to be more active. All these changes to other warrior stuff is just really really skirting the problem – healing signet is insane sustain, so much so that it pushes certain (normally non-condition due to poison) builds/classes out of the meta. I can slap a heal sig on any old warrior build and without even having to think about it (Because it’s 100% passive) that warrior build is now ready to tackle pretty much anything. The other heals aren’t even that bad now – in fact, they’re pretty good.

Really I dont think warrior is pushing non-condi classes out of the meta. It is the opposite. It is hard to play a necro when you have a couple of warriors jumping on you all game. Dont believe me then try it. Very little you can do. You cant CC them, you have limited dodges, no stab, and no soft cc. All this because of lyssa, zerker stance and healing signet. Honestly, sometimes I have to 1v1 a warrior whilst staying on a point to keep it, and I would say it is close to impossible to win

The issue is that warriors will do the exact same against power classes, and even worse because we usual burst builds can’t sustain so much high damage for so long, and they can dish out this damage easily.. especially if they get a good dodge in and out.

Basically warriors atm can counter everything easily for the reasons you described above… so non-warriors will still pick what its best/easier for them against other classes, which is conditions over power direct damage. Keeping in mind that warrior is not really burst spec, is sustain… same with thiefs.

I disagree that condis is the way to kill a warrior. Not 1 on 1 at least. I would take mesmer, ele, thief, dps guard vs a warrior everytime…as opposed to a necro. On a point this is, which is often the case. I would guess that a warriors easiest kill would be a necro. Probably why whenever I play there are 2/3 of them on the opposing team trying to jump on me all game and force 1v1s vs me. It is harder to beat a warrior now than it used to be to beat a cantrip ele with valk back before the ele nerfs/necro buffs. And that was basically never going to happen except if you hit 100% of skills and they were bad

I’m not saying that condis is the way to kill a warrior, if you re-read what i said, there is literally nothing going on that could counter warriors easily to be honest, maybe a dps guardian.. i’m not sure. But taking warriors out of the picture.. most classes will normally still pick conditions build over direct damage, because – apart from warriors – you can deal with pretty much anything with conditions. And now the meta has ‘evolved’ with CC builds from warriors simply because they can deal much easier with conditions, exact the reason why there are gazillion warriors out there.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Writetyper.1985:

I wish they’d just nerf healing signet slightly or change it to be more active. All these changes to other warrior stuff is just really really skirting the problem – healing signet is insane sustain, so much so that it pushes certain (normally non-condition due to poison) builds/classes out of the meta. I can slap a heal sig on any old warrior build and without even having to think about it (Because it’s 100% passive) that warrior build is now ready to tackle pretty much anything. The other heals aren’t even that bad now – in fact, they’re pretty good.

Really I dont think warrior is pushing non-condi classes out of the meta. It is the opposite. It is hard to play a necro when you have a couple of warriors jumping on you all game. Dont believe me then try it. Very little you can do. You cant CC them, you have limited dodges, no stab, and no soft cc. All this because of lyssa, zerker stance and healing signet. Honestly, sometimes I have to 1v1 a warrior whilst staying on a point to keep it, and I would say it is close to impossible to win

The issue is that warriors will do the exact same against power classes, and even worse because we usual burst builds can’t sustain so much high damage for so long, and they can dish out this damage easily.. especially if they get a good dodge in and out.

Basically warriors atm can counter everything easily for the reasons you described above… so non-warriors will still pick what its best/easier for them against other classes, which is conditions over power direct damage. Keeping in mind that warrior is not really burst spec, is sustain… same with thiefs.

Just let me choose whether i want to be in this map queue or not.

PLEASE

Writetyper.1985:

I wish they’d just nerf healing signet slightly or change it to be more active. All these changes to other warrior stuff is just really really skirting the problem – healing signet is insane sustain, so much so that it pushes certain (normally non-condition due to poison) builds/classes out of the meta. I can slap a heal sig on any old warrior build and without even having to think about it (Because it’s 100% passive) that warrior build is now ready to tackle pretty much anything. The other heals aren’t even that bad now – in fact, they’re pretty good.

Exactly… The healing skill is not related to any build so pretty much you can fit it right in, plus fact that warriors are not naturally squishy unlike eles/mesmer which means they can ditch out burst damage plus having insane sustain…

Wintel.4873:

Base stats + healing signet = most warrior builds are extremely viable (if not OP).

^

Healing Signet plus base stats make warriors truly hard to kill when they’re half kitten skilled, plus the immense amount of condi cleanse/immunity.

So yeah, give mesmers/elementalists the same healing signet and same base stats and i’ll run around with mantras or whatever other stupid build i can think off and wreck people down regardless… or i’ll run with conjured weapons and destroy people easily.

Phaeton.9582:

pedrst.3127:

Bad players just roll a class that can spam them while having stability…

FYI I often don’t even bother with a stunbreak…

Traited stability OP though..

Don’t know why I’m bumping this though… I may as well just write ‘flame me’

Let me just take a major wild guess here… warrior?

jonnis.2946:

The combat in the game was far too quick, the reason we have a condi meta is, I believe, an attempt to slow the game, and its worked. Better this meta than backstab thiefs and 100b warriors.

No. Because there are counters for burst, such as plenty of invuls, blocks, weakness (condition), and most of the counters actually require skill to use + reactive play. All they had to do was to reduce burst damage. Not to buff condition damage. Condition should be an assist tool in order to kill somebody, such as “debuffs” work in order games, to keep constant damage pressure + reduce healing + movement and so on, but the main damage in order to kill someone have to actually come from direct damage.

Conditions can nuke as much as a 100b warriors atm and there is not enough cleanses to counter it, you can instantly get overwhelmed with conditions to a point there is nothing you can do besides die (especially if you’re a class with lack of cleanses). There is no animation so you can’t know that you’re about to get condi bombed, unlike bulls charge + 100b where you could actually react to that actively.

Junkpile.7439:

I remember when i played counter strike beta and 1.6 and never got any skins or rewards.

Because CS is balanced. There are no disparities and gaps…. unlike…….. you know…. gw2.

@Savov,

Select Start here. And i feel your pain broseph……

How about we have a choice to opt for which maps we want to queue for? Similar to counter strike…

Every single queue at least 5 warriors, gg.

Phaeton.9582:

Bad players don’t know how to use cc

Bad players just roll a class that can spam them while having stability…

Most Zzzzzzzzz meta i’ve seen in a while -__-

Now just please get a proper balance (pre pax would be good), i’m queueing the whole night and even fights are closer its still all about hambow warriors and necromansers….

Oh and remove Skyhammer, most unbalanced map in a “pvp” game i’ve seen in a while.

2 guardians, 2 necromansers and a thief in Skyhammer… are you serious?

I just meet 2 guardians, 2 necros and a wiretrap thief in Skyhammer. Are you serious?

Oh sorry, i’m not getting any chest rewards because i transfered from EU to NA … wut do i do

soon

1234567890

First queue: me (mesmer) and another mesmer against 2 necros…

Needless to say ? Maybe its not a problem of balancing classes, maybe its just your kittenty balance with condition spam and cc over the top hmmm?

Solstice.1097:

pedrst.3127:

Solstice.1097:

I have to give ET credit for their siege usage. You guys have all the right siege in all the right places to defend your stuff. You make it incredibly difficult if we can’t keep things paper. Nobody is going to take your garrison this week unless it’s while you are asleep.

Was this the time when you guys had a couple golems running around in the capping circle after the lord was down?

We also made both AR and FC run for their money in Bay couple minutes before. You guys were hungry for our 5 Oz man

We tried to keep you busy in Bay while our other group golem rushed your garrison. We were hoping AR would help us keep you at Bay but they must have left?? because then you pushed us out with 30+ and when we regrouped in Garrison lord’s room nobody was tapping the gate so I’m pretty sure your WP was open the 2nd half of the fight which led to our eventual wipe.

I recalled dropping rams at south bay gate and instantly having them destroyed by a treb or mortar from inside. Then I dropped a treb in vale and it was instantly destroyed by a treb – the treb didn’t even miss once. And you had a treb on the south hill at Garrison that can hit water gate which I’ve never seen before, but effective for sure. And inner NE garri had ballistas and catapults and the works.

Just so much siege and people who know how to use it :-/

That is true actually, before most of us left Bay to defend Garrison we wiped some AR one last time but i was nearly sure they’d comeback and then take Bay undefended but they didn’t not sure why.

It just seems an overall huge disparity both in population and in coverage between ET and FC/AR. But its all good because we can run our 5 man group without having an ally zerg jumping in the fight… and we can try lead our pugs at times too, like when we ninja’d SM yesterday and then farmed FC zerg for 30 minutes straight and even got them back to their keep.. then we moved on to our borderlands since another commander asked for help and lost everything since there was nobody to defend.

Solstice.1097:

I have to give ET credit for their siege usage. You guys have all the right siege in all the right places to defend your stuff. You make it incredibly difficult if we can’t keep things paper. Nobody is going to take your garrison this week unless it’s while you are asleep.

Was this the time when you guys had a couple golems running around in the capping circle after the lord was down?

We also made both AR and FC run for their money in Bay couple minutes before. You guys were hungry for our 5 Oz man

Funny match up so far, quite enjoyable to hit the tail of the zerg and kite them around ! Just missing other small groups like ours roaming around so we can fight each other.

Dovgan.8605:

pedrst.3127:

@Anvil Rock zerg in EB, don’t take a squishy thief as your commander, else our 4 man will drop him infront of your whole zerg :P

Why would anyone feel the need to post this?

Uh .. congrats on killing someone!

Commanders, regardless of class, are a target to any organized group for obvious reasons, and any decent 4 man should be able to drop one with a target assist regardless of what class he/she plays. It’s an expected hazard of choosing to tag up.

That was not why i mentioned it – fact is a whole 30-40 manvil rock zerg is passing infront of ogrewatch… then we just come from a slope and nuke the leader of this zerg with ranged attacks and a guardian wall, and the best part was to have to kite all of them till Umberglade while the original direction you all were headed was SM

@Anvil Rock zerg in EB, don’t take a squishy thief as your commander, else our 4 man will drop him infront of your whole zerg :P

Roll the game back to pre-PAX. Keep the “fixes”, and start over again from there… don’t give burning to necros.. give them mobility.. scale pet stats with the owner’s stats.. reduce bunkers effectiveness… then reduce burst damage.. either nerf stealth or make it possible to have a counter play to it, for example: if you look the guy from behind you’ll see him even when he’s in stealth… or greatly reduce speed while you’re in stealth..

I also think ronpierce.2760’s idea would be nice too.. or something in that direction.

Protip: Winning a team fight instead of decapping far point is much better mathematically. Let alone full cap a far point.

Optimal would be for you to decap far point and be back in time to help win the team fight at middle, which requires certain classes to do that and good communication to be back in time – which is nearly impossible while soloq without proper communication.

NevirSayDie.6235:

What the other people in this thread are trying to say is that backstab has good counterplay, just not in the form of an obvious animation. We don’t understand what you want this skill to be. Would it be better if it kicked the thief out of stealth and then played a huge animation before landing? That doesn’t seem any better to me. Should it be easier to land but deal less damage? That just takes away the unique skill factor of the build. Should it be nerfed to the ground and give dagger thieves massive buffs to compensate? That seems unnecessary.

What do you think the skill should be like, and why would it be better if it were that way?

Give it a cooldown so you can’t backstab within 10s, and there.

I understand where you’re coming from Fortus. And i agree to a certain degree.. the whole issue is not backstab though, nor larcenous strike or anything like that. Its the fact that they can use it multiple times by just managing their initiative which is very easy – there is a lot of traits that help you in this direction. If backstab had an internal cooldown, it would be perfectly fine and balanced.

Dps guardians are basically the perfect counter to thiefs but as we all know, they’ve no room in competitive spvp… same for elementalists and mesmers at the moment (when they’re build for power damage), now if everyone goes AI spamming/toughness/condition damage then well, we’ve counters to thief.

Good idea, ideally people would rather wait to get a decent/better match.. but like Duke said this might bring the problem that with longer waiting time, the higher the chances of getting an afker. In order to fix this i would suggest the following:

After 1 minute since you queued there will have a popup message (maybe not in the middle of the screen but somewhere in the corner), with a 10-20 second time-frame for you to apply… something along the line “You still here?” (perhaps followed with an estimation of your queue pop if possible), if this message is not answered you get automatically kicked from the queue without punishment. And the process should repeat every 1 minute (debatable), so you still have time to do whatever and you don’t need to worry if you really need to leave in a hurry or just go make food or something.

Now while i’m writing this msg or just watching por… ahem, i mean checking the internet, my client crashed while i was at the heart of the mists… is there any other information you guys want?

More people are having it, Anet pay attention..

Why the kitten this is happening today? Yesterday was fine…

I keep crashing at random times in Battle of Khylo and shows me the msg for me to write and send the crash report to Anet, which i did…

Get your game straight please yo,

http://s12.postimg.org/lzsu1ifho/gw036.jpg

Current server IP: 64.25.38.97:0

During sPvP soloqueues… basically all maps, and i took a screenshot while at the heart of the mists:

http://s24.postimg.org/ykz6u35tx/l4g.png

Evan Lesh.3295:

We can’t make any headway on this unless you get a chance to post more information. If you are actively lagging, type ‘/ip’ into chat to get your current server’s IP address, and use the tracert command to gather more information. If you do post again, please include the server IP, the time of day you’re lagging, and the map that you’re on.

Here is how to use a trace route:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/162326

Here is a program that will actively do a trace route for you, graph it, and show packet loss:
http://www.pingplotter.com/

I can’t stress enough that just saying “I’m lagging” will not get us any closer to finding a solution. I wish there was more we could do, but we need more data.

You got it, i’ll do once i’m back home broseph

I can confirm it too, sometimes its good sometimes its bad.. i’m from Brasil so i know i’d have an usual delay. I’d suggest to:

open prompt cmd and type:

tracert account.guildwars2.com

This should show the travel times from your connection to Anet, recently i’ve had alot of package loss around Dallas, but i’m unsure whether this is Anet problem or ISP or whatever

Wasup OE, Ninesevensix here, good luck with that and i’ll hop you some gold whenever i can, perhaps try stream myself at some point ~_~

Ashanor.5319:

Yes, let’s just nerf everything. That is how you fix the game! /sigh

No. Lets buff everything like they’re doing right now, surely’s healthy to the game.. Look at the increase of the population ….. Oh wait.

Agree with everything @ OP, and even though it look like he’s giving a hard hit to thiefs, as he mentioned himself previously, those changes shouldn’t be all done at the same time, perhaps some changes/class with some small space gaps in between, while also looking at important ways to improve the UP part of the classes.

Oblivion.8307:

it’s kinda funny cause once warriors get nerfed, necros/sd thief/spirit ranger(potentially) will be getting qqed about, mesmer damage needs nerfing too, elementalist damage(arcane/airburst) could probably be reduced too. In turn you need to reduce guardian survivability. The joys of balance.

Imo just keep the fixes and “re-roll” the balance to pre-pax state (pre-necro patch), and then start working from there by reducing mesmer GS damage, reduce the effectiveness of stealth. Fix spirits, add some small tweaks in warriors and so on…

Good thread, valid points, but as Chaith mentioned, i doubt a full re-work will be in process, especially when it comes to thiefs being able to spam skills since their whole mechanic is about spamming and disengaging.

Regarding the discussion that it developed, it is very sad to see some people holding into some numbers to disregard the whole thread. Sure some numbers might be a bit off to loop, doesn’t mean that it does not happen, or make his general points invalid.

And if you don’t take his word for it, how about Chaith? one of the top NA engineers.
How about Ostricheggs? How about Helseth (check his rant videos)? I remember Phantaram saying that stealth openers were to strong and should be toned down, same with Teldo. Oh wait, i forgot they’re all incorrect and you’re right because there must definitely be some players out there who are insanely good and can beat cheesy builds.. Sure there is, but that’s not the point at all, i hope you understand that.

Gratz on making the game even less enjoyable to watch Anet.

I wouldn’t mind the fix to not teleport inside places but the Phase Retreat no Z-axis was to much in my opinion, you could actually use the terrain and was a good tool to kite, in a class that doesn’t have decent mobility in competitive play (take into consideration most damage is AoE anyway, so even if you phase retreat as a sort of stun break away from damage, u’ll still eat everything 0.5 sec afterwards since the nodes are usually small anyway), and now they are forced to use blink…

If you want to keep this change, then make thief shortbow number 5 also not able to go through Z-axis, if they want to teleport into ledges then they have to use shadowstep. If you do this, then i guess it is fair to keep the changes.

IGN: Select Start
Main Profession: Mesmer
Alternate Professions: Ranger, Thief, Elementalist
Account name: pedrst.3127
Practice Availablity: Weekdays 10pm GMT up to 2am & Weekends vary a lot but i can login much earlier.
Current PvP rank (Not Leaderboard): 39 (current leaderboards rank 128)
Level of Desire: Active Tournament Play, Casual Play, Leaderboard hogs (all of these)
NA or EU: EU

I know that since i’m from Brasil that i’m in a weird time-zone with Europe, especially mid-year, this is why i have a 2nd account for NA:

IGN: Chillin Yo
Main Profession: Mesmer
Alternate Professions: Ranger, Thief, Elementalist
Account name: saVdoom.2067
Practice Availablity: Weekdays 10pm GMT up to 2am & Weekends vary a lot but i can login much earlier.
Current PvP rank (Not Leaderboard): 25 (current leaderboards rank 543) It vary a lot since i’m yoloqueuein nearly every time, the one time i had a full EU group in their trial accounts for a whole day i reached leaderboard rank 43.
Level of Desire: Active Tournament Play, Casual Play, Leaderboard hogs (all of these)
NA or EU: NA

Powerr using ice bow.

facepalm

Like i said, just add me to your friends list and hit me up and then you can see how it goes saVdoom.2067 #174 atm

Please, what the kitten is going on?

Can’t do any tournament in EU atm, without being completely laggy for everyone in both sides.

Seriously Anet, what the kitten?